Hi Brian,
Thanks for your contribution.
In deference to Marijke's comment on thread drift, I think it is best to move this stuff to a new thread - maybe called "Wish List Management" ?
What do you think?
Regarding "middle tier" etc - such statements are probably made by folks who have a vested interest in having a "middle tier". (Or who absolutely need a "middle tier as a fudged way of linking OO front ends to legacy hierarchical databases such as IMS. This is often seen in Banks that have invested zillions in IMS/CICS programs and can't face up to the challenge of "doing the right thing" and switching from IMS to a properly designed relational structure.
However, your example is just one instance of what I see as a widepread propensity NOT to follow a formal approach to the general method of "understanding the problem" that I have labelled the "Objective<Problem<Solution" paradigm.
Brian Nalewajek:I relate this to the presumption of some ORM modelers that the UofD for an application domain is immutable
As I see it, this is not "just the presumption of some ORM modelers".
It seems to me to be better to describe the problem as a "Failure to observe the principles of the Cambridge University mathematician Augustus De Morgan as published in his 1848 book entitled
Formal Logic".
It was De Morgan who, in that very book, introduced the term "Universe of Discourse".
At root the issue is about the implications of and differences between formal and informal language.
I could go on at length about this (and I probably will after August 28th AND after we have gotten out of Marijke's hair and moved this discussion to its own thread.)
Ken