Re: O'Reilly interview with Date

Marshall Spight wrote:
> I think the thing we need to fix here is to have languages that
> are less procedural and more declarative, and more relational!

Agreed, 100%. Until relations are first-class citizens, we're doomed to endless overcomplication under the guise of "encapsulation" (which has meaning at the architectural component level, but no lower).

Give Alloy a look (http://alloy.mit.edu/). It's a specification/modeling (real modeling, unlike UML) language, rather than an implementation language, but its syntax and semantics will give you some idea how relations subsume objects quite nicely, while still allowing some of the syntactic sugar of O-O. A splendid and wildly underadvertised achievement in software.

• Eric