An Analogy ?

Here's a Monday morning throw-at-the-wall post for everyone !

Reading some of the recent posts, I got around to thinking about FORTRAN and SQL as analgous to each other. In both cases, they were essentially experiments to show that something could be done (in FORTRAN's case, that a compiler could produce executables almost as efficient as hand-written assembler code, in SQL's case as part of an experiment to show that a "relational" system could work). In both cases, special cases and "clever" workarounds to problems to allow the experiment to work became embedded in the experiment (e.g. the close tie-in between FORTRAN's control structures and the IBM mainframe model it was originally built on).

And, I would go on to suggest, both experiments have outlived their genuine usefulness and served to impede progress in their respective areas (that is, we're still stuck with FORTRAN 9x and SQL:2003).

Any thoughts, anyone ?

• Tony