What databases have taught me

Well after a brief hiatus I have just ploughed through the whole 800 posts of the OO vs RM thread. Some discouraging stuff indeed. Over the last few years a study of database technology, helped greatly by discussions in cdt, has educated my opinions significantly, and perhaps my albeit slow progress can be illuminative to others.

• I started life as a procedural programmer.
• I adopted OO and soon got the 'aha' click described by R. Martin.
• I spent years coding large OO projects, with beautiful, elegant architectures.
• I spent further years practically gnawing my arm off attempting to adapt my perfect OO designs as requirements inevitably shifted and exceptions arose.
• I finally realised that my 'aha' was utterly illusionary, and that my code, being OO, was inevitably and irrecovably imprisoned in a hierarchical strait-jacket

OO is hierarchy. Enforcing a hierarchy where none exists is an utterly dire and destructive artifice. If one does not recognize this, one is etiher wholly uneducated (given that the battle between hierarchy/networks and a relationship based models occurred decades ago) or has not been involved in enough large scale OO projects. Yet still this turgid "chinese doll" approach prevails through Java, C++ and the bastard child of them all, XML.

I still code via OO as I currently have no other preferable tools. And yes, I still absolutely take pride in my crafted generic OO designs. However I now don't waste precious time trying to perfect them, because I know they are by definition inflexible, brittle and flawed. So I make them lightweight and replacable, aware of the limitations of the neanderthal paradigm that we are currently lumped with.

It really is amazing that IT as a field has so little to do with the study of 'Information', of its nature and how it ought be structured for optimal manipulation and integrity provision, and so much on a 'Technology' fetish.

So apologies for the rant, but I find the current status quo very frustrating. I can only hope that this situation will change as the field matures and hierarchy-where it does not belong finally dies a long overdue death. Received on Thu Jun 22 2006 - 20:34:48 CDT