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A key characteristic of postmodernism is the absence of a “grand narrative”
[62, 48, 60]. Where once the majority of the world would have believed in God
or Marx, where architecture was simply building steel framed rectangular glass
boxes, where music was constrained to the twelve-tone row, where citizens of
a country all spoke the same language and supported the same cricket teams,
we may now contemplate with fear a sea of chaos, perhaps held together by
unenlightened self-interest.
Consider the Internet as we know it: a connection of loosely coupled com-
puter systems, of varying capacities, architectures, ownerships, costs, and sizes.
It connects every conceivable variation of every operating system and every
computer. It speaks many network protocols (HTTP of various versions and
brands; Telnet; POP; IMAP; NETBUI; AFS; SMB; . . . ); and through hardware
software gateways, the systems and protocols of what appears to be the Inter-
net are in fact unlimited. It can even reach computers that have been obsolete
and no longer exist: retrocomputing lives through emulation and lives on the
Internet.
Even the user experience of the World Wide Web is extremely diverse: every
web site has its own design, its own interaction style, its own personality, with
no commonality other than the menu bar provided by an individual’s browser,
one of many available, and customisable on a whim.
Compare this all with representations of a computational “infosphere” in
popular science fiction — such as The Matrix [69] or Neuromancer [33]. These
are typically modern in character, working in a complex but coherent way, and
presenting a uniform interface: the “Matrix” presents a realistic single graph-
ical presentation common to all users. Ironically, the postmodern Internet is
more real than these fantasies; and there is no one viewpoint on the Internet,
and there may be no commonality between two web sites even if hosted on the
same server and designed by the same people.
Although it clearly developed from the original success of the modern de-
sign of the Arpanet, the success of the Internet now is postmodern in character.
But it is success. And the tolerance of eclectic diversity is a key cause of the
success of the internet: it has allowed growth and interaction which instead of
isolation and alientation.
For postmodern programming, the absence of an overarching grand narra-
tive means eclectic tolerance in programming terms:
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There is equal acceptance of high and low culture: Visual Basic and Haskell
are equally of interest, as there is no reason to applaud the one and dis-
parage the other.
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The past is just another part of the present — programs can call on ele-
ments of modernism, either aesthetics or technology, and combine them
together in equal measure. As ancient computers live through emulation
on the Internet, so ancient programs and languages can live in connection
with programs not yet written.
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Programs can exhibit “faults in construction” that would be forbidden by
a modernist approach.
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Programming techniques (such as design patterns) and systems (such as
Aspect/J [44], or even the continuation code sections in literate program-
ming [45]) explitly support program organisation involving communi-
cating diverse elements.
Without a grand narrative, there will not be one common way to program,
or even one common kind of interface between programs. The alternative is
the postmodern multidimensional organisation encompassing many little nar-
ratives.
In practice, narratives may grow and shrink, reflecting the exercise of power
(especially by monopolist organisations) and the development of communities
(especially where cooperation is mutually beneficial).
Moreover, there are many kinds of narrative in programming, and systems
may have a postmodern character in some aspect but modern character in oth-
ers. For example the Microsoft Common Language Runtime [35] is postmod-
ern in that it supports a large number of programming languages — mod-
ern (C), postmodern (Perl), and historical (COBOL), high culture (Haskell) and
low (Visual Basic), with access to low-level features as necessary (a modernist
would consider this a fault). However, it is modern in that it achieves this
by enforcing a common bytecode format — indeed, a particular subset of the
format, and that it deploys the apparatus of power (verifiers, compliance kits,
bytecode type checkers, developer certification, code component certificates)
to enforce the commonality.