Re: An Analogy ?

"Tony Douglas" <tonyisyourpal_at_netscape.net> wrote in message news:bcb8c360.0411080308.1ff479bd_at_posting.google.com...
> 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 ?
>
According to the biologists, we're still stuck with the reptilian nervous system, even though that outlived its usefulness millions of years ago.

What does the reptilian nervous system have to do with FORTAN and SQL? Well, they are about communication and control in the animal and the machine. In case you don't recognize the phrase "communication and control in the animal and the machine", that's the field of study of cybernetics.

We're not actually stuck with FORTRAN or SQL. It's just hard to let go of a system once it's performing useful work.

If your job is to build a better replacement for SQL, then it's important that you not limit yourself to the same mistakes SQL made. If your job is to get a commercial database up and running in 13 weeks, better use SQL.

Me, I have cut my ties with FORTRAN some twenty years ago. But should we hire people to rewrite all that FORTRAN into Java? I think not. Not if I'm paying for it. Received on Mon Nov 08 2004 - 12:43:07 CET