On Sunday 11 Apr 2010 18:45:33 Chris Prather wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Shlomi Fish <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I hope I'm not going to start a flamewar or appear as too domineering
> > (which I know has been an ongoing problem with me) but I'd like to make
> > the proposal in the subject:
> > 
> > {{{
> > Let's start referring to Moose as "the modern Perl 5 Object System"
> > instead of "the post-modern Perl 5 Object System".
> > }}}
> > 
> > The reason is that "post-modern" tends to have very bad connotations in
> > art and philosophy, outside the narrow context of Larry Wall's
> > presentation "Perl, the first post-modern language", which even many
> > Perl programmers are not familiar with, and may give people who are
> > first introduced to the topic the wrong idea.
> 
> [citation needed]
> 
> When I was in University, admittedly a few years ago now, Post
> Modernism and one of it's tools Deconstructionism was very much the
> rage. In the years since I have left university I haven't seen these
> bad connotations. Do you have references?
> 

Here's a translation of a transcript of an IRC conversation on Freenode's 
#linux.il :

<<<<<<<<<<
<tzafrir_laptop>        rindolf, 
http://whatsup.org.il/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=6551
<tzafrir_laptop> What do you mean by "A post-modern object system"? It sounds 
like something dangerous to me.
<tzafrir_laptop> A non-objective Object system.
<rindolf> It's a translation from English.
<rindolf> have you read the rest?
<tzafrir_laptop> yes.
<elad661> Post-modern. Why? Is being modern not good enough for them?
<tzafrir_laptop> A modern system does not have a destructor.
<tzafrir_laptop>        http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/פוסט_מודרניזם    
http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/דקונסטרוקציה [Note: there are probably links to 
translations in the Hebrew wikipedia page]
<tzafrir_laptop> In any case, there are quite a few people for whom "post-
modern" is a very fishy describer.
>>>>>>>>>>>

Furthermore, there's this article called "Post-modernism : 8 follies" (in 
Hebrew - maybe Google translate will be able to make something mildly usable 
out of it.):

http://www.e-mago.co.il/e-magazine/postmodernism.html

I'm not quoting what it says there because, while I agree with the headings of 
the contents in the article that I skimmed, such philosophy like that is 
dangerously off-topic and flammatory here. It is possible that all this is 
more relevant to Israeli intelligentsia than it is to other people worldwide.

Nevertheless, one of my points was that everyone understand immediately what 
you mean by "a modern object system" while "a post-modern object system" will 
make people wonder why we added the "post-" and whether we refer to post-
modern art or post-modern culture.

> >On the other hand saying that Moose is a *modern* Object System
> >
> > will normally immediately give people the right idea.
> > 
> > I know that it's cute to call Moose the "post-modern OOP system" but it
> > may either make people wonder what the hell we mean, or may even give
> > the wrong impression, so I suggest we drop it.
> 
> One of the few popular posts in my blog explained this in detail. I
> refer you to http://chris.prather.org/why-moose-is-post-modern.md.html.
> Do you have evidence that it *is* making people wonder what the hell
> we mean?

See above.

> 
> > I don't mind working on the patch to the site and to Moose.pm to change
> > all "post-modern"'s to "modern"'s, but I'd like to know it would be
> > accepted first.
> 
> I for one like the Post-Modern epithet. Trying to suggest a package
> named Moose will somehow seem more serious by changing "post modern"
> to "modern" is I think ridiculous. 

Why do you think so?

> In four years I have only felt the
> need to defend the "Post Modern" description once (last April), and
> that was because the people questioning Moose had (what I felt was) a
> misunderstanding of the concept of Post Modernity[1].

Sometimes once is too much. What about all the people who got the wrong idea, 
thought Moose was not serious and decided that it's not for them? 

> 
> Ultimately if people are objecting to Moose because it claims to be
> Post Modern, they have deeper issues, and probably need to seek
> professional help.
> 

I don't object to Moose because it is "post-modern" because I know it just 
means "modern" with a more cutesy and artsy and domain-specific-knowledge-
requiring name. But many people will likely either wonder what we mean or 
reject it entirely. And no, that does not make them mentally ill[Professional 
Help] , just more reluctant to try Moose, or have a "WTF?" moment.

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

> -Chris
>  
> [1] I honestly shouldn't have bothered, but someone was *wrong* on the
> internet.

[Professional Help] - why do people keep suggesting that a person should see 
"professional help" for every little irrational whim or personality quirk? 
Many people are perfectly sane yet exhibit many personality quirks. That only 
makes them more interesting.

My mother told me that there was a study that tried to find out how many 
people in a study were normal. They eliminated people based on non-normality 
criteria and ended up with a small percent of people who were fully normal. 
And all of these people, without exception, turned out to be completely boring 
people.

And I'm saying that as a person who *is* seeing a therapist and likely suffers 
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder , and even got into a few 
manias. 
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