In which I explain why I once drove all the way to Pennsylvania to look at a house—Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1935 masterpiece, Fallingwater.
1 Sep 2013 20:58
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-For me, that is why //Fallingwater// remains such an inspiring place. As a [software engineer][/essays/reclaiming-software-engineering Reclaiming Software Engineering], I am acutely aware that my profession spent decades in thrall to a Modernist worldview---in particular the philosophy of logical positivism (which, oddly, had already been rejected by philosophers as intellectually bankrupt before a software industry had even existed). Even today, the Modernist approach to software engineering has been displaced---to the extent that it has been displaced at all---only by a vacuum. The most widely-practiced software engineering subcultures are ahistorical and devoid of any organising principle.
+For me, that is why //Fallingwater// remains such an inspiring place. As a [software engineer][/essays/reclaiming-software-engineering Reclaiming Software Engineering], I am acutely aware that my profession spent decades in thrall to a Modernist worldview[* Hugh Robinson, Pat Hall, Fiona Hovenden and Janet Rachel, '[Postmodern Software Development][http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.101.896&rep=rep1&type=pdf]', [The Computer Journal] Vol. 41, no. 6 (1998), pp. 363--375.]---in particular the philosophy of logical positivism (which, oddly, had already been rejected by philosophers as intellectually bankrupt before a software industry had even existed). Even today, the Modernist approach to software engineering has been displaced---to the extent that it has been displaced at all---only by a vacuum. The most widely-practiced software engineering subcultures are ahistorical and devoid of any organising principle.
Here is a (quite literally) concrete example that it need not be thus.