Monday, August 29, 2005
World's most useful blog
It's sobering to realize how black is the information hole around New Orleans right now. Hurricane Katrina. Cell towers down and powerless. Land lines inoperative. We have isolated little spotlights from CNN and Fox News, but they sent their teams to some downtown hotels, same as any corporate traveler, so these reports have focused on downtown. It's a lot like reporting from Baghdad hotels about the invasion of Iraq. N.O. is huge and dense. So check out the Times-Picayune's blog for the real dope. They deserve a Pulitzer for getting the information out to those of us really needing it. They're assembling reports there from all over the city. I'm a New Orleans ex-patriate, and right now I'm awaiting here in Austin the arrival of some family refugees who made it out, and are headed to live with us for... who knows how long. The power's going to be off for a month, and you can't get a drink of water. On that blog, and nowhere else really, I've been able to get some glimmer of info about my relatives' and friends' neighborhoods.
Friday, August 19, 2005
I Need a New Language: Rel?
I'm working through a Ruby experiment, sans Rails, and it's going well. I've also lately done a little Python CGI, and I've been burning bucks at Amazon buying the Lisp and Ruby books.
But, ho hum. Oh yeah, dynamic languages are great, you can modify classes at runtime, yeah, yeah. Blah blah closures blah blah.
People, we need to get past the object oriented paradigm, or model, or whatever it is. I'm groping for the one true programming model. Short of that, I'm hoping for one where I never have to do the stupid object-relational mapping again. Hibernate's popularity is emblematic of our decline. If you've got a ton of O/R mapping in your program, you've got a ton of dead code that does nothing for you. Every web app on the planet does this:
It's a failure of the languages we use, that we need application code to map the tables in which we store data, to some in-memory constructs called objects. And it's a failure of the architectures we use, that we end up flattening those objects into HTML representations.
I want a language for table programming. I think you can write programs in this language that do everything we expect of an application programming language -- building GUIs, reacting to mouse events, listening to sockets -- everything. Don't model your domain as objects. Model it as relations.
We need to explore how we can construct soup to nuts programs using the language of data. I haven't yet looked at Rel. But I wanted it to exist -- I wanted some implementation of Tutorial D to exist. Using that as a starting point, I can imagine programs that have a relvar (Date's term for a relational variable: essentially a table or a view) for MouseState. Whenever the mouse moves, the system adds a new row to MouseState. Yes, a lot of rows! We don't really need to persist them all. When a row gets added to a table or a view the system should invoke some code -- a trigger. The trigger code modifies other relvars in the system. And from that trigger code other events flow.
A programming language built around locating the right bit of code to invoke in response to some state transition -- that would be a useful evolution of OO polymorphism, which locates the right code to invoke based only on the shape of an object. Let's get off of this rutted OO cartpath. We're not inventing anything new here.
But, ho hum. Oh yeah, dynamic languages are great, you can modify classes at runtime, yeah, yeah. Blah blah closures blah blah.
People, we need to get past the object oriented paradigm, or model, or whatever it is. I'm groping for the one true programming model. Short of that, I'm hoping for one where I never have to do the stupid object-relational mapping again. Hibernate's popularity is emblematic of our decline. If you've got a ton of O/R mapping in your program, you've got a ton of dead code that does nothing for you. Every web app on the planet does this:
- Make some queries to the db;
- Build some objects possibly having object references;
- Iterate over the objects and flatten to tabular HTML.
It's a failure of the languages we use, that we need application code to map the tables in which we store data, to some in-memory constructs called objects. And it's a failure of the architectures we use, that we end up flattening those objects into HTML representations.
I want a language for table programming. I think you can write programs in this language that do everything we expect of an application programming language -- building GUIs, reacting to mouse events, listening to sockets -- everything. Don't model your domain as objects. Model it as relations.
We need to explore how we can construct soup to nuts programs using the language of data. I haven't yet looked at Rel. But I wanted it to exist -- I wanted some implementation of Tutorial D to exist. Using that as a starting point, I can imagine programs that have a relvar (Date's term for a relational variable: essentially a table or a view) for MouseState. Whenever the mouse moves, the system adds a new row to MouseState. Yes, a lot of rows! We don't really need to persist them all. When a row gets added to a table or a view the system should invoke some code -- a trigger. The trigger code modifies other relvars in the system. And from that trigger code other events flow.
A programming language built around locating the right bit of code to invoke in response to some state transition -- that would be a useful evolution of OO polymorphism, which locates the right code to invoke based only on the shape of an object. Let's get off of this rutted OO cartpath. We're not inventing anything new here.
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Spam Silver Lining
When I'm waiting for that really important email, and nothing appears in my inbox for hours, and I suspect Norton AV has again croaked and is blocking, I check my spam folder for recent messages, to verify that the mail is still getting through. It's a constant, incessant ping!
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