http://people.iola.dk/arj metalinguistic musings and other related ramblings Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:13:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2 http://people.iola.dk/arj/2010/02/04/how-far-have-we-come/ http://people.iola.dk/arj/2010/02/04/how-far-have-we-come/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:47:32 +0000 Anders Rune Jensen http://people.iola.dk/arj/?p=434 Things like these makes me wonder, with all the advances in computer science how far have we really come?

• 40 years after the invention of relational databases we are still manually defining indexes
• 40 years after the invention of Unix, the scheduler in Android (= Linux) still does a terrible job at scheduling the tasks that really depend on it (games and audio)

]]> http://people.iola.dk/arj/2010/02/04/how-far-have-we-come/feed/ 0 http://people.iola.dk/arj/2010/01/18/programming-nirvana-part-3-relational-databases/ http://people.iola.dk/arj/2010/01/18/programming-nirvana-part-3-relational-databases/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:37:27 +0000 Anders Rune Jensen http://people.iola.dk/arj/?p=421 This is actually a blog post I have been meaning to write for quite a while not, but I just never got around to it. Relational databases are ubiquitous in programming. Whether it’s mainframes, application programming or even phones now a days everyone stores persistent data in a database. Recently there has been some talk about non-schema databases and there’s a myriad different implementations of them, but why the sudden interest?

• Database has at least two things that makes it less than ideal for agile development. First one being types, especially if the types propagate out into the application code (*cough* Microsoft). The second being based on a schema, which means that one has to make all the choices up front.
• Databases are really built for a single machine, and even though all the big database vendors has replication support, it still seems like a bad solution if one really wants scalability. There are a lot better ways of doing scalability now a days (a distributed hash tables comes to mind).
• Databases are meant to be standardized, but in reality they are not. They all have different syntax to do common things.
• It has been said that when you build a DSL, then sooner or later it will turn into a (bad) full-fledged programming language. What if instead the data was simply part of the program and you could manipulate it as you are used to? Functional languages makes this much easier and possible. Especially a programming language that is built with concurrency in mind.

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