The Quote of the Week was posted on the QUOTES page.
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A 'To Laugh or Cry item was posted on the LAUGH/CRY page. I usually prefer recent items, but once in a while I come across old ones that I just cannot resist.This is one is from 2003 and thingd have gotten worse.
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The link to my latest All Analytics column was posted on the FP ONLINE page.
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Links to online exchanges I participated in were posted on the FP ONLINE page.Here's a comment from one:
From my experience, that traditional model has changed as data warehouses are being driven to near real time business intelligence and used as a common repository for disparate systems. The separation between front line systems and data warehouses was due to software and hardware demands could not handle a mixed work load, minimizing costs, plus application products requiring different data stores. The world has moved on. There are DBMS's that can handle mixed work loads with enormous scalability. Application products are becoming broader in business features. Pricing models have changed.So the whole idea of a distinction between operational databases and data warehouses significant enough to require distinct database technologies, let alone deviations from the relational model, has not exactly held water, has it? Which was pretty predictable.
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Roy Hann has posted a comment on my article on SQL redundancy: Fabian Pascal on Ingres
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An old blog post that links to a page on my old site no longer available, so I don't know what the subject was, but something that makes sense, for a change: How do we tell truths that might hurt
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An interesting read on renting software: You Will Subscribe To, Not Buy Software. Worth reading for some of the negatives of the Cloud which, as is usually the case, are disregarded when a fad is being pushed to extremes.
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I want to comment on a snip of that Dijkstra quote in 'truths that might hurt' :
ReplyDelete"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
BASIC was my first exposure to computing and computers. You know. The TRS-80 thing.
BASIC was also my first exposure to **business** computing and **business** computers. Most of you won't know, but it was a **fantastic** environment to work in. MAI Business Basic. BASIC extended with decent file management. 32K of RAM on a Z80. Up to 7 concurrent users could fit inside alsongside the OS.
Now, 30-35 years later, I am one of the very few people in the world who actually managed to build a working TRDBMS. As a programmer, have I been "mutilated beyond repair" by BASIC ?
Given current attitudes towards TRDBMS, I suspect that you may indeed be considered mutilated beyond repair. :)
DeleteSocial generalizations have exceptions. And exceptions are not the rule. Would you say you are representative of programmers?
Erwin, I think what Dijkstra objected to in BASIC and COBOL was the absence of the proper constructs for doing structured programming. This was certainly the case at the start for both languages but both responded constructively to Dijkstra's criticisms by adding the necessary functionality.
DeleteOf course if someone has never learned how to do structured programming then adding the constructs won't help them very much.
I think the point made about natural languages is an interesting one. Though I agree that programming directly in natural languages is not a realistic goal I think exploring the relationship between the natural language expression of business rules and their formal expression is a fruitful and necessary endeavour.
The link between natural language and formal expressions is predicate logic. This is the context in which McGoveran disagrees with Date on the latter's "external predicate" concept.
ReplyDeleteAn external predicate is the informal user interpretation of a formal predicate when the predicate is applied to a real world aspect.
Formalizing the informal when the latter is complex is non-trivial, but is practically impossible without any familiarity with logic.
The use of natural language is effective for very narrow domains of discourse, not general purpose data management.