In a previous article I explained why I generally do not think it is worth debating the relative merits of one
computer language over another, while at the same time pointing out one major exception: whether the language
in question is untyped vs. strongly typed. Unlike the other properties of a language, I believe its ability
to guarantee the type of each variable in the code base is extremely important in the lifetime cost of software
written in that language. Like many of the other posts,…
Despite growing up in a country where football (soccer, for my American readers) is the universal passion, I never
understood the appeal, and I never shared it. However, I suspect it to be similar to the passion that a discussion
on technology choices evokes among software engineers and architects: despite being otherwise excessively
rational beings (at least according to everyone in a different profession), we favor technologies by faith
instead of reason, and we get emotionally attached to…
The software development Zeitgeist seems to be pointing away from the necessity of having explicit data schemas. Nowadays,
designing a database schema, or even just an ER diagram, seems to be downright old-fashioned, and an activity that
is viewed more as a burden or a restriction, rather than something of value. At the risk of being labeled a
contrarian, I would like to make the case in favor of explicitly designing data schemas.
