Re: Is relational theory irrelevant?
Date: 19 Nov 2003 03:22:16 -0800
Message-ID: <e4330f45.0311190322.1bce4d19_at_posting.google.com>
Serge Rielau <srielau_at_ca.eye-bee-m.com> wrote in message news:<bpdge7$pv$1_at_hanover.torolab.ibm.com>...
> On the general topic of education (and smoking). While ceasing to do a
> bad thing is a fairly simple thing mentally.
Smoking causes physical dependence.
> Educating someone to
> actively think a different way (our brains are not wired in relational!)
Many IT professional's brains are not wired in relational due to the brain damage caused by a bad education.
I could teach the fundamentals of The Relational Model to any average business administration graduate in a few hours, but it is almost impossible to teach it to many IT professionals.
In fact we learned the most important foundations of The Relational Model in the elementary and secondary school (sets and set operations, predicate logic, etc).
Curiously, my BA graduate fellows talk among them about relations of customers, articles, invoices, etc. While my CS graduate fellows talk about tables.
> is a lot more "expensive". Given the amount of work there is do do in
> the space it is simply not possibly to man the projects with properly
> educated people because teh education woudl be either too epxensive or
> there are not enough people available who actually can think be made to
> think relational.
Perhaps they are employing the wrong people. It is a lot easier to educate "clean" minds.
> Teh same woudl be true for SQL. It woudl be required for each college(!)
> diploma to have MORE SQL classes, explaining the model a lot deeper. But
> that increases the length of studies or requires to kick out other stuff
> (Java, C?).
We could reduce the length of studies about assembler, imperative programming, analogic electronics, digital electronics, physics, etc.
When I was student, the number of hours devoted to The RM were less than 10.
Regards
Alfredo
Received on Wed Nov 19 2003 - 12:22:16 CET