On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 2:05 PM, Frank Manola <fmanola@a...> wrote:

Roger--

Do you mean data is *important*, or do you literally mean it is *primary*.  If the latter, then something else, say X, is secondary.  What's an example of X (maybe there are many of them)?  At the same time, "data is primary" creates for me a picture of solipsist computer programs:  they just sit there "processing", nothing going in, and nothing coming out.

Code is secondary. I think many of us in the XML world agree, but would not intend it to be some sort of fundamental axiom to be enshrined next to the von Neumann architecture.  Rather it's a note of caution to an industry which has so often put most of the effort in solving computer problems into design of code, and far too little into the durable modeling of information which is actually the point of writing most code, and which in practice is generally valuable long after code becomes obsolete because of evolving computer architectures, operating systems, languages, etc., and especially because of the career mobility and ultimate death of the coders themselves.

--

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