As one might already know, I read a lot of books. Two of the latest titles have been A Generous Orthodoxy and A New Kind Of Christian – both written by Brian McLaren.

These books discuss a lot about Christianity (and other religions) as they pertain to modernism and post-modernism (among other things).

This got me to thinking about the software development industry, and how the industry is reacting to an era in transition. We are transitioning from the modern era to the post-modern era (and probably have been for a while, whether or not we knew it) – and I’ve formed a bit of an opinion (hypothesis?) about programming languages, tools and frameworks as they relate to this post-modern transition.

It seems to me that the characteristics of dynamically typed languages are those that seem to embrace post-modern characteristics, whereas the characteristics of statically types languages seem to more tightly cling to the characteristics of modernism.

Some terms I’ve heard, used in characterizing post-modernism are things like transience, flux, pluralism, fragmentation. Modernism seems to try harder to rationalize everything, with concreteness – very ‘scientific method’ like.

Am I completely out to lunch, and off my rocker? Probably. But I see a lot of post-modern characteristics in tools like Python, Ruby and Rails. And I see a lot of modern characteristics in tools like Java, C#, etc.

If I wanted to start to talk really crazy, I might say that tools like ASM, BCEL and ideas like Aspect Oriented Programming attempt to take a modern paradigm (in this case Java related) – and, keeping the ‘safety’ and ‘concreteness’ offered by Java as a statically typed language, apply manipulations to byte code at compile or load time, in an attempt to provide some of the benefits that a language like Ruby provides out of the box (in these examples, the ability to dynamically modify and redefine code at run-time). One thing that’s great about tools like Spring is how it manages to take the best of what it can from both paradigms (given the limitation that it’s a framework written in Java for Java developers) – and bring all sorts of post-modern characteristics with it to the Java platform (load-time weaving, friendly AOP, etc.).

I’m probably blabbing about a whole lot of nothing, but no one said you had to read it. :)