A Painful Learning Experience Revisited

Painful but valuable. This old thing has popped up onto folks' radars again, with some interesting discussion here

I'm sad that the PoMoPro experiment kind-of fizzled out. I occasionally try to talk Ivan into doing a second conference, but without success.

3 comments:

Nat Pryce said...

What would you want to be in a second PoMoPro conference? The only concrete idea we came up with was who to invite as keynote speaker (Bruce Sterling, but whether he'd accept I don't know).

keithb said...

I got the impression that some people got the impression that what Post-Modern Programming is all about is web mashups.

What I'd mainly like to see is workshops in the PoMo stylee, but with solutions based more on what we used to call a "program"

Very few of us spend our working days bashing out mashups, instead we "write" "programs" I expect the interesting result that, forced to "write" a "program" the PoMo way folks would (as per Noble's paper) end up doing pretty much what they do in their day jobs without realizing it. But placed in this new context they would realise it.

Sort of thing.

Anonymous said...

That's what we were hoping people would get from the original scrapheap challenges. At SPA we tried to make the challenges less biased towards web mash-ups and Unix batch-processing pipelines, and I think the challenges were more interesting as a result.

I'd like to run longer, larger challenges that would take (thinking off the top of my head) four people all day to complete, which might relate more to what people do in their day jobs.

On the other hand, however, I think people did create genuinely useful, non-trivial applications in only 45 minutes and that itself is a valuable insight. Sometimes we don't need to write "programs", even in our day jobs. Or, what we think of as a "program" is changing, becoming more integration and coordination than algorithm.