OiRc-0006 Cutting through the thicket

If you're paying any attention, you've noticed that I used to be far more timid in my promotion of Relationships.

The example code in the previous entry has Relationships but it doesn't have nearly enough.

I still had the concept of radixes into 'code tables' as

• radixTable( aTableSymbolString, aLanguageRadix) answer any radixed value sets (array of labels) to associate aTableSymbolString, aRadix with a string value. The defaults are hardcoded English and internationalization will be handled by an internationalizationTable where sets named aTableSymbolName are stored in the table as aTableSymbolName, languageRadix, setRadix => aString.metadata
• slotLabel( aLanguageRadix, slotName) answers a label for a slot named aSlotNamed in language aLanguageRadix. The defaults are hardcoded English and internationalization will be handled by an internationalizationTable where slot named className, slotName, languageRadix => aString.metadata

This was an error that I can only attribute to the depth of a habit of embedding references to other objects in other objects.

Its one thing to being able to draw a distinction between business object data models and another one to fully realize that system design should be made up of 'a few rules, ruthlesly applied' (I think thanks or apologies are due to Alan Kay, the founder of Smalltalk, for that quote but I've just Googled it and I seem to be quoting myself again.)

The habit was hard to break. It took me years so I don't expect to encounter it in the wild for a while yet.

Part of my problem was that I knew that dis-embedding the references to radixes would lead to much a more complex schema definition.

It would be harder to visualize, harder to manipulate and harder to implement systems based on this vision, some might call it a near hallucination, of Objects and Relationships.

I will revisit my notes from my exploration of the complex and wonderfully normalized database schema that revealed 750+ Objects and 1,200+ Relationships. But if, as I suspect, it also made the distinction between Business Objects and radixes into code tables, the 750+ objects was infact an underestimation.

More in the next blog entry.