Re: The IDS, the EDS and the DBMS

Laconic2 wrote:

> ... The consistent problem I've had with OO philosophy is that
> they think concepts don't exist until they are "invented" within the OO
> paradigm. For, example, Java "invented" automatic garbage collection, a
> mere 40 years after McCarthy invented the same thing.

That is more a generation/culture thing. We tend to project the origin of things important to us closer than they are. Both closer to us and closer to eachother. Heroes from furhter away cease to exits, but their deeds are atrributed to our familiar heroes.
Our heroes get more heroic each time their story is sung.

> It reminds me of the joke about the diverse group of new arrivals being
> given the tour of heaven.
> I'll skip the joke. The punch line is: "Sh! Sh! They don't know any of the
> rest of us are here!"

> Back when I taught design, the hardest concept to get across at the outset
> was this: for any challenging design problem there will be more than one
> satisfactory solution.
>
> Programmers tend to learn that there is one "right" solution, and a bunch
> of defective approximations to that solution.

Unless they learn TIMTOWTDI
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ThereIsMoreThanOneWayToDoIt from the start.
I vaguely remember learning some "Law of undetermined structure" roughly stating that given the "protocol" (defined as output prediction for every input) of a function, the function itself would still not be defined - but I forgot who told me (Google did not help me this time, epic concentration suggests it was my uncle :-) Received on Fri Sep 10 2004 - 19:41:28 CEST