“This spec is something more than devs, I tell you. It’s the monster. Devs made it, but they can’t control it.” – with apologies to Steinbeck Ahh, factory-forged random values for fields of unique constraint. How thee vex me with thine probabilistic usefulness and definite indeterminacy. Keep thyselves with ephemeral values of algorithmic parameters and [...]
Browsing Posts in Rant
Object/Relational Mappings (ORM’s) are in the wrong place in the architecture.
An application should have minimal impedance mismatch with the persistence of its own data. External or ancillary systems should bear the cost of mapping between paradigms. If you want to access application data in a relational way for reports, do the mapping for the report.
Squealer is a simple, declarative language where the mapping from the tree structure of MongoDB to the tuple space in mySQL can be scripted.
Recently, Les Hatton wrote a compelling article entitled The Chimera of Software Quality. (Les Hatton, “The Chimera of Software Quality,” Computer, vol. 40, no. 8, pp. 104, 102-103, Aug., 2007) A section of the article headed The cost of poor quality points out the economic impact of poor software quality, and the almost belligerently ignorant [...]
I still hate the handling of spaces – especially when you’re throwing in mixed path delimiters using nice GNU tools on DOS/NTFS. If you ever want to get rid of SVN or CVS folders (or whatever) in a large source tree after someone has zipped it and sent it to you straight from their workspace, [...]
It’s 2007 – you’d reckon everyone would be able to handle spaces in directory names on Windows by now. You’d reckon the command program on Windows would be able to interpret stuff too so sensible command line arguments would be sent to the program being executed: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0no_not_again\bin\java -cp C:\Program Files\My App\classes you.goddabe.kidding And even it’s own [...]
Javaâ„¢ isn’t really the success we think it is, you know. Java programs written the way Gosling et al originally intended would clearly be using the object-oriented paradigm (sure, they’d be applets in a browser, but that’s another story). What happens when the COBOL crowd (of which I was one) gets their working-storage sections and [...]
