Re: What databases have taught me

"Marshall" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1151031561.833094.70320_at_c74g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> JOG wrote:
> >
> > - 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
>
>
> Nice post!
>
> The progression you describe above is pretty much exactly the
> progression I went though as well.
>
>
> Marshall
>

My progression was different, mainly because I started earlier, and took a different turn.

I started as an assembly language programmer, with a little bit of work in 3GLs.
I help build a language of the Lisp family. Some of its more useful innovations were later subsumed by additions to common Lisp. Eventually I taught my self structured programming and ALGOL, so I became what you guys call a "procedural programmer". Later, I moved to the VAX from earlier DEC computers, and I decided to learn Pascal, rather than any of the other available languages.

By the time I got exposed to OO, I was in my forties. When the apostles of OO said, "forget everything you ever learned about programming", I tuned out. I wasn't about to do that.

My epiphany was in a different direction. It was the move from "process centered thinking" to "data centered thinking". In my mind, this is a greater leap than from procedural programing to OOP. YMMV.

I began using Datatrieve (a DEC language) with indexed files, and then migrated to Rdb, DEC's entry in the relational DBMS derby of the early 80s. From then on, I've been database oritented. I'vbe written code, but only for the sake of the data it manages. Received on Fri Jun 23 2006 - 14:47:48 CEST