[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Re: SQL instead of XQuery [main]
> I'm very wondered, that industry have not been thinking about > non-programmers: i meet only one mention of this topic - in > publication of 1974: E.F. Codd and C.J. Date, "Interactive > Support for Nonprogrammers: The Relational and Network Approaches". > They wrote (in 1974 !), that role of "random" users was > increasing greatly, and really these users soon would present > majority, Actually the designers of COBOL thought the same in the 1950s: COBOL was intended to be written by business people, not by programmers. The notion that non-programmers should be able to write programs, while inherently self-contradictory, has been a goal for computer science ever since computers were invented. The technology that came closest to success in this was probably the spreadsheet (Visicalc). There are millions of non-programmers, or at any rate self-taught programmers, writing code (often rather bad code) in a wide variety of languages including Javascript, XSLT, SQL, XPath and lots more. But as far as database query is concerned, ad-hoc end users do not write code: they use simple form-filling interfaces, notably the single-search-term Google query. The characteristics of such interfaces are (a) there's no such thing as a syntax error, and (b) you don't need to know the schema. Michael Kay http://www.saxonica.com/
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