There’s a wonderful book by the political philosopher Marshall Berman called All That is Solid Melts Into Air. The subtitle of the book is the experience of modernity, and, indeed, the book tries to capture the feeling of what is like to live in the modern period, as illustrated through the writings of famous modernist authors, both fiction and non.
Berman demonstrates how the modern era, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century, was a time period of great ferment. The world was seen as turbulent, dynamic. People believed that the world we lived in was not a fixed entity, but that it could be reshaped, remade entirely. The title of a book is a quote from Karl Marx, who was alluding to the idea that all of the structures we see in the world are ephemeral.
In contrast, in the post-modernist view of the world that came later, we can never cast off our history and start from scratch. Every complex system has a history, and that history continues to constrain the behavior of the system, even though it undergoes change.
We software engineers are modernists at heart. We see the legacy systems in our organizations and believe that, when we have the opportunity to work on replacement systems, we will remake our little corner of the world anew. Alas, on this point, the post-modernists were right. While we can change our systems, even replace subsystems wholesale, we can never fully escape the past. We ignore the history of the system at our peril.
Surfing Complexity 