Re: Some Laws

"robert" <gnuoytr_at_rcn.com> wrote in message news:da3c2186.0409231518.29479ecd_at_posting.google.com...

> in all, i like java. what irritates me is the drive to turn it into
> COBOL. java folk i've met see the redundancy in their language: the
> relational database is really an object store without the froo-froo.
> it is data and behaviour rolled into one. with a standardized, which
> is to say language and application independent, access. this is not
> a good thing if you're desperate to lock in clients. same was true of
> pre-DB COBOL: you can't read a VSAM file w/o the file def in the COBOL.
> you had to have the application. with low cost DBs, there's no
> reason to lock yourself into some application code. the truth is in the
> data, and any application (or none at all) can access and update it
> without worrying about hurting it: it knows the rules to protect itself
> from knucklehead users, and knuckleheader coders. that's a great thing
> to have.

Excellent point!

The truth is indeed in the data, and not only in the process that formed it.

I was a programmer for 20 years before going into databases. And I had what one analyst called the "process centered mindset." He was very patient with me in explaining the difference between the "process centered" view of the world, and the "data centered" view of the world. Learning databases was, for me, learninng a whole new way to think.

My disappointment with the track record of object oriented thinking is this. In theory, "object centered thinking" could reunite "process centered thinking" and "data centered thinking" in a very nice way, preserving the best of both worlds, and reconciling them with each other. But the people who are "turning Java into COBOL" are reducing "object oriented thinking" to merely "process oriented thinking", using fancy terminology.

BTW, I'd like to say a few kind words about COBOL. It was a really good attempt at defining a "higher level language", one that would create code worth reading by non coders. Somebody should revive that attempt with an OOPL that doesn't look like portable assembler. Received on Fri Sep 24 2004 - 13:31:15 CEST