Re: O'Reilly interview with Date

dawn wrote:

>
> I made a pitch in 1986 to do a pilot project with db2 instead of IMS.
> In retrospect, the person I disussed it with was right to dissuade me
> and not jump into db2 at that point. My rationale was that db2 was
> relational, so it would have less complex schema and be more flexible,
> working only with relations etc. In fact, my rationale sounded a whole
> lot like many on this list today. How far I've wandered, eh? But IMS
> is a far cry from MUMPS, for example (I say "PICK" too often) and both
> might be considered hierarchical. Just because one implementation that
> appears relational isn't agile, doesn't mean anoter isn't.
>

I had the good fortune to get some private programming lessons from the man who invented MUMPS, he told me "minimize code, maximize data!" and it is probably the most consistently solid, flexible, and overall useful bit of advice I've ever gotten.

But the system he showed me, Magic, appeared to be very monolithic, where the programming language and data manipulation were totally tied together (ok, this was a handheld device so that's what we'd expect, but there is still some small validity to bringing it up), and I wonder have you always worked on tools where the data management and other areas such as UI development are very tightly coupled?

-- 
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
(Ken)nneth_at_(Sec)ure(Dat)a(.com)