Re: Ideas for World Hierarchy Example

On Jan 12, 7:41 am, "Neo" <neo55..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > Its almost as though there is a concious disrespect in some parts of
> > > the community to the years of effort, hard work and diligence of those
> > > who preceded us.
>
> > Disrespect? Sure.
> > But I'd say that plays second fiddle to plug ignorance.
>
> I think fundamentally Dawn is pointing out that non-RMDBs [...]
> are di-graph-ish and are possibly better for some types of
> applications. Why is this being ignorant?

I wasn't speaking of Dawn per se. But suppose someone makes the claim that X is possibly better for some types of Y. Why should I even care? I watch a lot of TV, I hear a lot of radio, and I surf a lot of sites: I hear approximately one million product claims a day. *Claims* do not interest me; I am interested in empirical evidence, comparative study, and theoretical foundations. These things are available, or one can do them oneself.

It doesn't have to be a ten million dollar HBS comparative longitudinal study, either. Someone who wanted to convince me that I should pay attention to some other data model could simply post queries that are hard for SQL and easy for their system. And their SQL better be damn good, or it'll get picked apart in short order, either by me or by a whole host of people here who are a lot better at SQL than I am.

A lot of people have come through here with a lot of alternative ideas, and so far the number that has impressed me is exactly one: Vadim's relational lattice approach, which I note is *excruciatingly* well-grounded in mathematics. One of the very first things I read about it was its algebraic properties: commutativity, associativity, idempotence, asborbtiveness.

Consider some other approach to data management, or even general computation. What are its primitive operators? Is the set provably minimal, or is there some redundancy? What algebraic properties do they have? What useful theorems can we derive from these properties? What is the computational power? It is the same as first order logic, untyped lambda calculus, what? What is the computational power of the type system? What interesting theorems can it prove about source code? What is the concurrency model? How does it compare to shared-state concurrency, or transaction isolation, or message passing concurrency? What is the constraint system like? How does it integrate with the type system? What constraints can be proven statically?

These questions are interesting.

I wonder if maybe a digraph-ish approach is better for some kinds of applications?

That question is not interesting.

Marshall Received on Fri Jan 12 2007 - 18:46:01 CET