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

From: erk <eric.kaun_at_gmail.com>
Date: 13 Jun 2006 06:10:52 -0700
Message-ID: <1150204252.733769.120130_at_i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>


Robert Martin wrote:
> On 2006-06-02 04:06:37 +0200, Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> said:
> > [...]
> > http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html
>
> A great paper. I love the bit about "complexity sells". I wonder,
> between the two of us, which one of us was selling complexity when I
> said that the database was (in the abstract) a bucket of bits, and you
> were talking about relational calculus.

You've completely inverted the meaning here. Complexity is what higher-level tools and languages should eliminate, so that each user isn't forced to tackle the complexity (in various ways). Vendors take on the burden of coping with some complexity (of a different sort!) to save us from it. That's why we pay them, right? Hopefully, they even do it relative to some established and useful theory, although of course that's seldom the case.

Your argument, applied to DBMSs, would argue for remaining immersed in assembler (or direct machine) code, in order to avoid any "complexity" associated with language vendor lock-in.

And to address your point even more directly, a relational calculus IS simpler than a "bucket of bits." Presumably, you believe that objects are simpler (for us, the users!) than direct memory addresses and the typeless values stored therein?

> EWD is indirectly one of the fathers of OO. His name is on a book
> named "Structured Programming". In that book Dahl and Hoare describe
> Simula 67, arguably the first OOPL. They talked about how they
> stumbled upon the notion of objects by moving the stack frame of
> block-structured function from the stack to the heap.

And yet we have this quote attributed to him: "Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California." It might not be him, but I'll take his non-interest in O-O as evidence of his regard for it.

  • Eric
Received on Tue Jun 13 2006 - 15:10:52 CEST

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