All new ideas face opposition from “The Old Guard,” those who are invested in the success of the previous way of doing things.  New things come along, and for many it is difficult to adapt.  One defense mechanism is to deny the validity of the new idea, without examining the thing personally or in depth.  Consider the theory of evolution – this new theory was such an affront to the Old Guard’s way of thinking about the world that they were unable to take it seriously.  The Establishment had to die off before science could be undertaken: examining these theories and determine what is valid and what isn’t.

BUT, I’m not here to get into THAT debate, and instead want to consider this issue from a different light.  The Data-Centric application view will be with us until all of those who have invested their careers in it have retired or adapted.  Some day, developers will look back and wonder how we managed to accomplish ANYTHING.  Perhaps similar to how you might wonder how those programmers of old could get any work done on a VT100, without memory management, IDEs that have breakpoints, or Google..

But consider the future – What is the next Big Shift going to be, that’ll blow all of our minds and cause us to want to instinctually reject the change?  Dynamic typed languages?  Functional Programming?  Object-Oriented Databases?  Getting rid of TCP/IP and using DECNet instead? 

What is it you’re missing?

Tony Rasa Esoterica