We'll never get O/R mapping right

Ted Neward calls O/R mapping a "quagmire" in The Vietnam of Computer Science. He's right (although the Vietnam analogy is a distraction).

He considers approaches to licking the problem, and he almost gets it right with "Integration of relational concepts into the languages". Yeah -- but he limits his consideration to tweaks to mainstream languages (dismissing "fringe" languages like Ruby... not that Ruby's doing it right).

We're not going to get this O/R mapping thing right... ever. It's the "O" in "O/R" that's the problem. We need languages that think in terms of tables or relations. The object languages have us whirling in a Sapir-Whorf spiral. Relations -- tables -- are the language of data. Objects attempt to deal with data but in an ad-hoc way, with no grounding theory that enforces integrity and consistency; you enforce all that in procedural code. Objects may be a handy idiom for writing simulation programs. But the 99% of other programs out there that traffic in data, even transiently, need to be written ground up in a relation oriented language.

Relation Oriented Programming: I've written about it before. I believe the right answer is going to be to construct a relational idiom in the fringe language Common Lisp. I've already begun! Expect results about the time Arc is ready.