Re: What databases have taught me

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.

> [...]
> 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.

Marshall Received on Tue Jun 27 2006 - 06:24:19 CEST