What databases have taught me
Date: 22 Jun 2006 18:34:48 -0700
Message-ID: <1151026488.310207.201890_at_m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>
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 Fri Jun 23 2006 - 03:34:48 CEST