« Safari, AIR | Main | Twitter for replies »
June 25, 2007
Specs vs reality
Specs vs reality: Tim Anderson has an interesting observation here, from "Dr D Richard Hipp, the main author of SQLite", on how rules describing acceptable behavior are different from acceptable behavior itself: "If you've ever picked up a copy of one of the official SQL standards you will find it largely inscrutable. They are next to impossible to make sense of. Even for particular details of syntax you can study it, and they are so vague that you can't really understand what they mean. So a strategy we've used when there's some question about how something should work is we write a little test script and run it on lots of popular SQL database engines, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and try and find a consensus. Then we code to make SQLite work the same as everybody else does." Most of us humans learn how to act by comparing our behavior with other people and seeing what really works, rather than reading a book... same thing. A spec is a helpful abstraction, but it isn't a model implementation itself. Tim's full article on Hipp's work is also illuminating, with perspective on how GPL and other licenses compare to simply putting something in the public domain. (In a prior item Tim asked why the AIR docs don't mention SQLite, and I misunderstood that as a functionality question, rather than a branding question.)
Posted by JohnDowdell at June 25, 2007 08:50 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/8836