accessibility, not grids

Chris Muller chris at funkyobjects.org
Thu Jul 7 03:09:13 UTC 2005


> I used to write more business apps than I do now, but grids o' data are 
> really important in many business apps (as uninspiring as they are). Just 
> look at how important MS Excel is to modern businesses. It is just a virtual 
> machine solely dedicated to running and persisting grids.

I believe its not the grid that makes Excel so popular, its accessibility.  A
user sits down in front of a computer screen, a blank piece of "poster board"
in front of them, they discover the arrow keys to move around and then typing
stuff in, save and load, etc...  They relate to it as an incremental
improvement to a real paper poster-board.

As "power users" discover the advanced scripting and their spreadsheets become
large, they may graduate to MS Access.  Queries and VB can better slice and
dice the higher-volume of data and even make applications but, ultimately, its
just a bigger better Excel.  Contact applications are easy, but you don't
typically (want to) see network-provisioning or GPS-map routing or a
space-shuttle assembly and experiments modelled in tables (although many put
themselves through this because its their paradigm).

I'm not sure I know how to explain it, but I sense that these pervasive
grid/table representations in business domain-modelling have actaully created
counter-paradigms to "object thinking" (not that there is such a thing).  For
example, a one-to-many relationship in RDBMS tables is exactly
opposite-thinking to how you think about it in the real world and objects.

I'm saddened when I read a hoopla article about people not "getting" objects. 
In my view, there is nothing to "get" about objects, its the more natural way
to think about the information and the domain model.  I think the problem is
due, in part, to the constrained, "inside-the-box" as it were, thinking that
takes place subconciously after so many years of use of these table programs
like Excel..

It's so popular and yet, straight-out "grids" occur rarely in class-based
business domain models.  Seriously, name three logical business entities you
want to model as a grid in your actual domain?  Maybe there some
high-volume-data applications such as astronomical data, but how about in more
conventional business?  In most cases, whatever relationship that ends up
complex enough to represent as a grid ultimately (should) end up represented in
as more-meaningful graph of objects.

I think if people could be taught, from the beginning, as simple a way to build
a graph-of-linked-pieces-of-information that they can customize as easily and
comfortably as the electronic poster-board program, and that graph of
information could just be stored, shared, retrieved, searched, etc. as easily,
then a grid-control becomes much less important..

And when the power-users discover "messages", look out..

Of course, better tools to realize this dream are needed.  For that, I'm
staying-tuned to Squeak..



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list