Re: The wisdom of the object mentors (Was: Searching OO Associations with RDBMS Persistence Models)

Marshall wrote:

> Bob Badour wrote:
>

>>Robert Martin wrote:
>>
>>>Granted, granted.  But destroying the data is not the same as isolating
>>>the data management mechanism from the data model.
>>
>>More ignorant tripe. Do you even have a clue what a data model is? What
>>sort of data model you are talking about? Without that, what you wrote
>>is not only wrong but essentially meaningless.

We human beings are wired to make sense of everything we experience. As a result, it takes considerable discipline even to recognise and to acknowledge incoherent nonsense.

In a sense, the nonsensical and the totally irrelevant are don't care conditions as far as natural selection goes. Making sense of nonsense and finding relationships among the unrelated impose no selective costs. Failing to make sense of a danger (getting eaten) or of an opportunity (starving needlessly) can impose a significant selective cost. Thus, we evolved to make sense of things quickly regardless whether it makes sense to make sense in the first place.

One can easily verify this by repeatedly selecting two words at random from the dictionary and asking oneself what are the relationships between the words. One's mind will almost always come up with a few.

When confronted with a nonsense sentence like the one above, humans will internally edit the sentence into one that makes sense. When you first read the sentence, I am sure your mind made minor substitutions of meanings until it meant something to you, and you didn't notice the lack of meaning. Other readers will make other substitutions until it makes sense to them; even though, it might mean something different when finished.

This is a human characteristic that brushes up against both Dijkstra's comments on elixirs and Date's _Principle of Incoherence_. It works very much in the favor of self-aggrandizing ignorants.

Here in Canada, we recently had a Prime Minister who so badly butchered his mother tongue as well as our other official language that the news media habitually reported what they thought he meant instead of what he actually said--even when purporting to quote him.

It takes discipline and work to read things as carefully as one would read a requirements document, a functional specification, a detailed design or a program's source-code looking for errors, but often that is exactly how one must read. It also helps to train one's mind to recognize the various forms of sophistry and of fallacious reasoning.

Even then, one is fighting an uphill battle.

>>Sadly, I have been paid large sums of money to fix the problems created
>>when teams started with "We've got objects. Woo hoo!" instead.

Thank you. I wish it were included solely for humor and not as an accurate description as it was on some occasions. D'Oh! Received on Wed May 31 2006 - 23:17:31 CEST