Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Declarative XML Processing with XQuery
 I agree on all points. I think that for about 50 years or so, we have watched the emergence of computer science which some barely think qualify as a science from the soup of formal theories of language, philosophy and logic in an environment that has been at times rigorous in its demands of proofs for requirements and at other times, quite market-driven. At times it has emphasized performance and other times, ease of composition. During the 80s at least, the realization that languages and data were outliving the hardware offered new challenges to the language designers. With data becoming a first class citizen and as Tim Bray says, 'it's not what you say but what you save' becoming a new mantra, we once again try to find the right combinations of tricks we know how to perform on the von Neumann architecture. All I know is from having written the same application in three languages, Visual Basic, FoxPro and C# is that VB was easy to learn but the hardest to do anything right, C# was harder to learn but once learned, the easiest for adding features to the application, and that FoxPro, even being a two tier language, was the most productive although the trickiest to debug (and the programming GUI simply [expletive deleted]). The main reason was the integrated queries. So perhaps it is true that as a result of our work on the web, for the first time, all of the different models and tricks are comparable in a common zeitgeist and a common platform. We now know a lot more about how hypertext systems, object and relational databases, plus the file-oriented systems such as XML and delimited ASCII can be combined. We can compare scripting with objects to programming objects, and we understand the value of unified addressing. As a result, even if this is another cakewalk to see which technology is left without a chair, computer science itself is maturing in the fact of our practice of having to implement systems that reach to the entire world and scale at least to the complexity of e-mail/gmail/3DMaps. I'll skip over the object-oriented vs relational issues we I think are not really boolean (no single selector suffices without other considerations). len From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@s...] > Thanks. Off the top, some of what I like about Foxpro > comes back with the language integrated query. I don't know FoxPro but there were a lot of 4GLs in the 1980s that integrated database access closely into the programming language. I've never been sure why they failed. For some reason the market was incredibly fragmented (no-one had more than 3%) and there were no standards. I think people wanted better programming languages than the 4GLs offered by the database vendors, and the independent 4GL vendors wanted to be database-independent; and of course the disaster called client-server became fashionable. So in the end loose coupling won the day - people moved to dynamic SQL embedded in anything (in the form of character strings passed to procedure calls), which on the surface is about as bad a design as you can get from a programming language theory point of view. So on the one hand I'm pleased to see a resurgence of interest in database programming languages, and on the other hand I'm feeling a strong sense of deja vu and wondering what lessons have been learned from the last time around. One thing I am convinced of: a good database programming language is likely to be very declarative. Michael Kay 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
