"Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science"
About this Quote
Wall’s line is a programmer’s wink disguised as a cultural timeline: post-modernism didn’t arrive everywhere at once, and computer science has been pretending it’s exempt. The joke lands because tech culture loves to see itself as relentlessly forward, “modern” by default. Wall flips that self-image. He frames software not as pure engineering progress but as an art form that’s late to admit it has fashions, orthodoxies, and rebellions.
The first sentence reads like a textbook, but the rhythm is conversational, almost shrugging. That’s the tell. He’s not staking out a strict definition of post-modernism; he’s naming a mood: distrust of single, totalizing theories, preference for bricolage, irony toward grand narratives, comfort with pluralism. In music and literature, that meant collage and self-reference. In architecture, it meant ornament returning with a smirk. In programming, Wall implies, it means languages and practices that stop fetishizing one true paradigm.
Context matters: Wall is the creator of Perl, a language famous for “There’s more than one way to do it.” That slogan is basically post-modernism in code: eclectic, pragmatic, suspicious of purity, happy to mix styles if it gets the job done. So “still coming” isn’t just prediction; it’s advocacy. He’s nudging computer science away from modernist austerity - the clean, minimal, mathematically elegant ideal - toward something messier and more humane: tools built for real people, real constraints, and the comic inevitability of complexity.
The first sentence reads like a textbook, but the rhythm is conversational, almost shrugging. That’s the tell. He’s not staking out a strict definition of post-modernism; he’s naming a mood: distrust of single, totalizing theories, preference for bricolage, irony toward grand narratives, comfort with pluralism. In music and literature, that meant collage and self-reference. In architecture, it meant ornament returning with a smirk. In programming, Wall implies, it means languages and practices that stop fetishizing one true paradigm.
Context matters: Wall is the creator of Perl, a language famous for “There’s more than one way to do it.” That slogan is basically post-modernism in code: eclectic, pragmatic, suspicious of purity, happy to mix styles if it gets the job done. So “still coming” isn’t just prediction; it’s advocacy. He’s nudging computer science away from modernist austerity - the clean, minimal, mathematically elegant ideal - toward something messier and more humane: tools built for real people, real constraints, and the comic inevitability of complexity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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