Prism Rationale, Part 2

[David Jeske]

On Mon, Jan 04, 1999 at 10:17:10PM -0700, Jim Little wrote:
> * Semantic errors may be reduced by using a programmable system whose
> semantics are as close as possible to the semantics of the problem
> domain.
> 
> In other words, DON'T USE ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE TO QUERY A DATABASE!  :) 
> Use SQL.  Or, more simply, "Use the right tool for the job."  If you
> don't, you'll deserve the bugs you'll get.
> 
> I call this philosophy "Paradigm-Independent Software Engineering"
> (PISE).  The idea is that no one programming technique, be it
> object-oriented programming, functional programming, or even spaghetti
> programming :), is the right tool for every job.  But they're all the
> right tool for some jobs (yes, even spaghetti programming... um, maybe).

I think there is definetly a related issue, where within a given
language, there are different (traditionally syntactic) paradigms
going on. For example, in C, do you call a function or access an
array? In higher-level languages like smalltalk/self they homogonized
all actions into 'method calls/message sends'. However, then the
different paradigms are different protocols/collections of
methods. For example, do you use an array index type access pattern
(i.e. a->itemAt(1);) or do you use a linked-list access pattern?

It's often the case that you have a body of code which uses one access
pattern, but you'd like to store the data in another (usually
superior) access pattern because you want to add some functionality.

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + jeske@chat.net