Re: Storing data and code in a Db with LISP-like interface

On 21 Apr 2006 13:48:12 -0700, Mikito Harakiri wrote:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

>> It shares its "wrong something" with RM - there is
>> no universal search strategy.

Different languages / paradigms call it different. It might be "inference", "optimization", "fitting", "search." Turing machine does not do it. That is the problem. You cannot write an implementation of Prolog or of RDBMS which would solve *each* problem in a close to optimal way. Specialized programs written in universal purpose languages outperform integrated engines by margin. What is worse, to achieve a better performance people start to hack design breaking otherwise nice abstraction. In the end one has neither clean maintainable code, nor performance.

> As for "wrong something" you forgot the
> most often cited RM defect: "flat" relations.

There wasn't much work on components either for languages like Prolog, or for SQL. So it actually is difficult to say if with more advanced languages based on same paradigms one could have composable abstractions. One concern is that abstractions seem tend to be hierarchical (like values -> types -> classes -> sets of types in OOPL.) But that is an observation from the opposite camp, it might be wrong.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de