Re: What databases have taught me

From: Dan <guntermann_at_verizon.net>
Date: 26 Jun 2006 21:40:07 -0700
Message-ID: <1151383207.166609.324200@c74g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>

Marshall wrote:
> Dan wrote:
> > Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
> > > Bob Badour a écrit :
> > > (snip)
> > > >
> > > > One might add that the 80% of complicated code Bruno saw resulted from
> > > > having a surfeit of structures to choose from and a paucity of available
> > > > manipulations in the first place.
> > >
> > > One might better not assert anything in the wild. A significant part of
> > > this code was in RDBMS-based, procedural apps. RM is not more of a
> > > silver bullet than anything else - if done wrong, then the result wrong,
> > > period.
> >
> > Absolutely true! Relational or object-oriented, it doesn't matter,
> > it's the thought process and ability to apply critical analysis to
> > problems that makes or breaks the project or solves the problem in the
> > most elegant way possible.

> It's one thing to say that quality individuals are an important
> part of project success; it's quite another to say that the
> choice of tools or computational models or "paradigms"
> doesn't matter at all. If that were true, then front panel
> switches would be just as good as SQL for data
> management, and OO itself, with an IDE, would have
> been an unnecessary change from Pascal and Fortran
> and punch cards.

>
I'm not sure I'm understanding. Babbage, Turing, Shannon, and many others did just fine. I now see the problems they solved, resolved in the worst possible ways with the state of the art tools and computational models. The ideal soluton would be both of course, but that just goes to support my assertion that it isn't black and white.

>


> > [...]

> > It's funny...the RM camp comes off using the exact same arguments as

> > the formal specification movement camp; yet no one makes the
> > connection.

> I've made the connection, and lots of other people have made
> the connection.

Oh my. I missed it then. Apologies.

If the arguments in favor of mathematics and logic as a specification for programming and systems architecture had been couched in terms of Alloy, NP, Catalysis, Fusion, UML, the Object Constraint Language (OCL), or Z, perhaps it wouldn't be an RM versus OO thing as much.

>
>
> Marshall

Received on Mon Jun 26 2006 - 23:40:07 CDT