Re: sql views for denomalizing

David Cressey wrote:

>

I understand that it was claimed of Fortran that it would obviate the need for programmers. Thankfully I postdate the arrival of Fortran, but I've certainly heard of plenty of things that are supposed to make programmers obsolete. Apparently UML is going to do that as well. As Bullwinkle would say, "This time for sure!"

> There was an article, a long while ago, entitled "the next 700 programing
> languages". It was about how people keep inventing "data languages" in
> order to get away from programming, and then turn these "data languages"
> into programming lanaguages.

For sure. As an aside, it's quite clear to me we need a really good combined data/programming language. I'll get right on it. Writing code in a statically typed language to assemble untyped strings which are then passed to a statically type SQL is teh suck. I want unified typechecking between my application language and my data language!

> This business of turning data into information has been around for a long,
> long time. And, IMO, it'll be around for a long time to come.

Absolutely. The only thing that'll make programmers obsolete is an artificial intelligence smart enough to write code based solely on reading the PM's requirements docs. And even that process will have to be iterative, because the PMs will say, "no, that isn't what I *meant*."

It's clear that much of the complexity of programming is fundamental complexity. (Although we shouldn't let this stop us from rooting out the non-fundamental complexity.) You can't just solve the problem with a new language. As Brooks made clear, there is no silver bullet.

Marshall Received on Sat Jul 30 2005 - 23:46:38 CEST