Computer proverbs for Fred Shapiro

[Jesse Sheidlower]

James A. Landau wrote:
[...]
>  Nowadays database systems like Microsoft Access and its competitors
> use Codd's rules but bury them so deeply under a GUI interface that
> only serious computer scientists delve into the gooey details.  It
> was not always so.  As late as 1984 (when I was in systems
> procurement) there was considerable debate on whether Codd's ideas
> were worth implementing.

Maybe I've just been spending a little too much time on MySQL
programming lately, but normalization issues are still a huge
part of database design. I don't think it's at all accurate to
say that "only serious computer scientists" are concerned with
it. Fine, regular desktop Access or FileMaker Pro users probably
aren't concerning themselves with normalization, but it's by no
means a marginal concern.

Jesse Sheidlower