Re: Data is primary .... why?

From: John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>
To: Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org>
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:53:06 -0400

Play the video

(d) "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, 1975).

I updated this for publication in Eric Raymond's 1997 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar as "Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures, and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious."

Guy Steele then rewrote it again in 2002 for "Objects Have Not Failed" as "Show me your interfaces, the contracts for your methods, and I won't usually need your field declarations and class hierarchy; they'll be irrelevant." I think Haskell people might agree with that, though they don't generally think of themselves as OO folk.

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 8:29 PM, Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org> wrote:

Now we're getting somewhere.

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 31, 2014, at 6:29 PM, Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:

>
> On 31 Mar 2014, at 20:00, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> Long ago Michael Kay said something like this:
>>
>> Data is primary.
>>
>
> I've no idea what the context was, but I think there are probably two ways I would expand the statement:
>
> (a) Data lasts longer than programs and has more value. Therefore don't lock your data into proprietary formats that won't survive the software used to create them.
>
> (b) In designing a software system, the core piece of design that you need to get right is the data model.
>
>

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Follow-Ups:
- Re: Data is primary .... why?
  - From: Steve Newcomb <srn@coolheads.com>

References:
- Re: Data is primary .... why?
  - From: Frank Manola <fmanola@acm.org>

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