Re: Ah, but who has better parties?

"Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra" <leandro_at_dutra.fastmail.fm> wrote in message news:pan.2004.05.14.01.31.06.708198_at_dutra.fastmail.fm...
> Em Thu, 13 May 2004 16:16:11 -0700, Paul G. Brown escreveu:
>
> > I'm ain't Anglo-Saxon (close though) but it's precisely my infatuation
> > with pragmatism that *interests* me in the R model.
>
> I am not saying the RM isn't pragmatical, rather that the
> attitude that everything must be practical is short-sighted and
> counterproductive.

That sounds like me as a grad student. I agree that not everything must be practical and I also recognize that something that appears to have no practical use today might solve world hunger tomorrow. And from that perspective, I think research related to relational theory is important. I also think there are some aspects of that theory that are practical today. But there are some aspects of relational theory that have been applied and there is really no proof that they have helped the software profession in any way.

Relational theory in a vaccuum is someone else's game (not mine, but likely yours) and have at it -- advance it and learn new things about it, but please don't force practitioners to use it until it is better than whatever else is there. Please test those drugs before you get us addicted to them. It is just too costly to go from the "hey, this theory holds together mathematically" to "companies should use products that implement aspects of this theory because we know it is good for them" without adequate testing.

Emperical data to prove that such things as 1NF are good for us (the software development industry and our users) seems to me to be the responsible thing for us (as an industry) to collect before we go and stick it to the world with implementations of untested theories.

just an opinion, of course. smiles. --dawn Received on Fri May 14 2004 - 05:01:30 CEST