Re: Object-relational impedence

"topmind" <topmind_at_technologist.com> wrote in message news:79dc34f4-be5e-4adc-9b26-0b394a5d4173_at_s37g2000prg.googlegroups.com... On Mar 16, 7:55 pm, Bob Badour <bbad..._at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote:

> I'm trying to figure out how the OO mind ticks. It's like trying to
> figure out the psychology of Go To defenders. (I never met one, they
> retired just before I got there.)

I never met a GO TO defender either. In 1962, when I took my first programming course, everybody I knew used GO TO freely. About ten years later, I taught myself to program without GO TOs. It was difficult at first, but later it was easier then with GO TO.

I recollect that people who wanted to use GO TO simply were following force of habit, with no elaborate rationalization.

Like you, I am trying to understand what the OO people are thinking. I would suggest that many OO thinkers would compare people who program procedurally (like myself) to the GO TO die hards. And just as abandoning GO TO was only the beginning of adopting the structured programming discipline, so likewise learning inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism is just the beginning of learning to conceive of a system as a collaboration among objects.

Unlike some people in the c.d.t. newsgroup, I am not quick to dismiss OO people as total fools. If OO were total foolishness, the industry would have gotten over it by now. The same is true of SQL, by the way.

So far, I've managed in all these discussions to boil the OO vs RM impasse down to one single assertion of some of the OO people: that messages are not data.

I remain firmly convinced, arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, that messages are data, regardless of whether or not messages are used to convey behavior. And I think that it's the failure to recognize that messages are data, and that message structuring is data structuring, that has held OO aloof from data management for all these years.

In keeping with this thought, I think that an "Object Oriented Database" should not store "persistent objects", but rather "persistent messages". These messages are directed "To whom it may concern" like a message in a bottle. This is quite different from sending a message to a particular object. But it's messaging nonetheless.

In order to concretize my thinking, I would have to learn not only OO, but OOP as well. I'm not sure I have the mental stamina to become procifient in OOP. Received on Mon Mar 17 2008 - 12:40:23 CET