On Sun, 2005-06-26 at 10:59 -0700, Bob Pawley wrote:
> I'll date myself so you all may know from where I am coming. My first lesson
> in binary math took place in a classroom in 1958. Since then I have
> witnessed a lot that has since swept under the bridge.
>
>
>
> This thread reminds me of the discussion that surrounded the complexity of
> using the first spreadsheets (the precursor to today's Databases)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What? Well, I admit I was not there in the 60's, but IFAIK databases
predate spreadsheets by far.
[...]
> In my 47 years of being somewhat aligned to the software industry this story
> was repeated over and over again.
>
> There is a lesson to be learned from the Wang experience.
>
> People want tools to do tasks. They do not want to spend their own time (or
> their own money to hire others) to build, design, repair or change the tools
> that they need just in order to accomplish their own work - the work they
> know best and from which they make a living. A good tool - a perfect tool -
> is like a hammer. Its use is immediately known and it can be deployed
> quickly, accurately and with little or no specialized training.
Pardom me, but the last sentence sounds ridiculous. Think of a Master
Smith making a perfect Katana. Guess which tool he's going to use
mostly? The hammer. Explain me how "its use is immediately known and it
can be deployed, accurately and with little or no specialized training"
applies here. Expecially the last part. Do you _really_ think that just
looking at even a remarkably simple tool such a hammer makes you able to
accomplish ("accurately"!) _anything_ that can be done with it? Before
answering, think about Michelangelo or Da Vinci.
> So I caution all to not make light of newbies who are searching for good
> tools (not even perfect tools - yet) to do the work that needs doing. The
> world will not sit by and continue to pay for Wang operators.
There are tasks that require the human brain in order to overcome the
lack of row performance of computers. Those task are not complex, it's
the computer that is slow. Give 20 years of advance in the computer
industry, and those tasks will require no human brain at all, for the
computers will be fast enough.
But not all task are like that. Some will grow with the computers. The
bigger the processing power, the more data you want to process. Some are
just complex at human brain level, _no matter what tool they involve_.
We have wordprocessors these days, but they don't turn us all into great
poets and writers, even it they are terribly better compared to quills.
There is some (brain) complexity in computer systems in general, and
there is in databases. It's just that some tasks are not for newbies, be
the tool a hammer or a RDBMS. When the tool is aimed mostly at such
tasks, there's little need to make it too newbie-friendly.
.TM.
--
____/ ____/ /
/ / / Marco Colombo
___/ ___ / / Technical Manager
/ / / ESI s.r.l.
_____/ _____/ _/ Colombo@xxxxxx
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