From: Howard Stearns hstearns@wisc.edu Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers listsqueak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org To: The general-purpose Squeak developers listsqueak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: Re: relational for what? [was: Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, Revisited] Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:16:22 -0600
Of course. No question. Except, of course, where they don't. The 3-tier enterprise software scenario is -- to me -- an example of it NOT working.
I think this is due to your bad experiences with bad implementations.
I used to write expert system software. A fellow once asked, "But couldn't I do that with Fortran?" The answer was, "Yes, and you could do it with pencil and paper, too, but you wouldn't want to."
There's a whole bunch of problems for which pencil and paper are good enough, but maybe not ideal. Same for RDBMS. And there's all sorts of practical considerations in this range. Worse is Better, End to End, and whatever you like. No one is (I hope!) going to walk away from a solution in-hand that is good enough.
There are also problems for which pencil and paper really aren't suited for. Same for RDBMS. They can be made to work with the great expenditure of resources, chewing gum, bailing wire, duct tape, vise grips, etc. And half of all enterprise IT projects fail. And yet even with this knowledge, there's still a 50% chance that you can make an RDBMS work on the wrong kind of problem if you throw enough money at it.
Completely agree.
What I'm trying to do -- and of course, this isn't a Squeak question at all, but I hope it is a Squeak community question -- is try to learn what domain a perfectly running RDBMS is a good fit for by design, compared with a perfectly running alternative (even a hypothetical one).
Programmer time. How long will it take to make the RDBMS run perfectly (for some definition of perfectly) vs. writing this alternative.
It is the same argument of using an existing DSL vs. just writing it by hand in your favorite language.
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