Re: Multiplicity, Change and MV

Bob Badour wrote:
> Marshall Spight wrote:
>
> > The tools we have today don't lend themselves to this
> > style of thinking; however better
> > integration between our application languages and
> > our data management languages and libraries would make this
> > sort of approach more feasible.
>
> I would like better integration between application languages and data
> management languages as a means of improving our application languages.
> Let's empower application programmers to operate closer to the level of
> intent.

Yes, that strikes me as an important thing that ought to be happening but isn't. The data management world and the application programming language world haven't done much cross-polination, to their mutual detriment.

> > Many applications in the business world are "enterprise" applications
> > and involve the integration of disparate systems, but some applications
> > tend towards being monolithic--Photoshop for example.
>
> I don't use photoshop. Is it something like paintshop pro or the gimp?
> Or is it more like adobe illustrator? (Not that it matters for the example.)

The Gimp was designed as an open source knockoff of Photoshop.

> Let's assume it's like the gimp. It has to have image acquisition
> applications, image manipulation tools, image transformations, file
> format converters, printing applications, plug-in integration, standard
> plug-ins, a scripting language and probably other applications I have
> not yet considered.

These are sufficiently tightly integrated that it is customary to refer to it a single application. I used the word "monolithic".

I'm not sure if this was your intended point or unrelated, but what your paragraph above highlights for me is how such applications are only really able to integrate with code that was *designed* to integrate with it. The ease with which, say, a SQL dbms supports ad-hoc queries would be a great model for application programming language designers to emulate for support of "ad-hoc integration."

Marshall Received on Fri Apr 21 2006 - 09:43:04 CEST