Re: Newbie question on table design.

"Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:463b2728$0$4045$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net...
> David Cressey wrote:
>
> > "Anne & Lynn Wheeler" <lynn_at_garlic.com> wrote in message
> > news:m3lkg5yjkt.fsf_at_garlic.com...
> >
> >>"David Cressey" <cressey73_at_verizon.net> writes:
> >>
> >>>I know practically nothing of CDC culture, but quite a bit about DEC
> >>>culture, going way back. My impression of CDC culture, gleaned
> >
> > indirectly
> >
> >>>from what Niklaus Wirth had to say about the CDCmachines, is that CDC
> >>>culture discovered interactive development later than DEC culture did.
> >
> > I'm
> >
> >>>just about certain that IBM culture discovered interactive development
> >
> > later
> >
> >>>than DEC culture did. This is somewhat related to the topic at hand.
> >>
> >>I've often commented that it wasn't that IBM culture didn't have
> >>interactive development ... which was compareable to features/size of
> >>most other vendors (that might be considered interactive) ... it was
> >>that in the 60s, 70s & much of the 80s, the batch market size dwarfed
> >>the interactive.
> >
> > Fair enough. IBM culture was big enough, at the time, so it could
> > accommodate a large number of internal subcultures. The part of IBM
culture
> > that was visible to me was definitely not into interactive development.
> >
> > Even though they had interactive terminals, on line editing, etc. etc.
> > compiling a source program was a batch job. And that affected the
workflow.
>
> I have to say that can have some advantages. I know a couple people who
> were coding back then, and they know how to debug software. With
> interactive tools, it can be a little too easy to spend all of one's
> time in edit/compile/run mode rather than look/think/code mode.

You are absolutely right. I can back that up from my own experience. At about the 1969 time frame, I had been using interactive timesharing systems for a while, and I knew how to use the debugger and the text editor amazingly well. But my ability to design a piece of software that was logically correct (barring minor errors) at the outset was, in retrospect, less than it might otherwise have been.

Between 1969 and 1980, due to a series of job changes and outlook changes, I migrated from assembler to Pascal. Pascal was the first language that I learned thoroughly before writing any programs. And, in the Pascal learning materials, there was a great deal about designing a program correctly.

Wirth had the attitude that there was no reason why a carefully written program shouldn't compile on the first try. I never got as rigid as that. But Pascal ended up being the main reason I never learned the VAX debugger. The VAX debugger was, by all accounts, much more powerful than the earlier more primitive tools I had used (DDT for example).

There is an instructive lesson in all of this for database design. There are an awful lot of pitfalls that can be avoided by simply learning the rudiments of the theory (or at least the design principles that follow from the theory). I don't need to say this to you, Bob. You propund the same thing very often. This is for lurkers, and perhaps for the OP of this thread. Received on Fri May 04 2007 - 17:36:50 CEST