Dr. Dobb's Journal October 2000
In the last three installments of this column I managed to inadvertently offend, malign, and disgust: 1. Canadians, 2. Penguins, and 3. Members of organized crime. I've heard from the Canadians, and expect to be hearing from the penguin lobby any day now. Before the minions of organized crime get mobilized, let me clear the air.
Any slight was unintentional, and not at all in keeping with my open-tent embracing of diverse ethnicities -- what I like to call my "Compassionate Columnism." Somehow my positive, upbeat paean to the greats of organized crime came across as a parody of "The Sopranos." I suspect that it was a copy-editing error.
I would like to state here and now, for the record, so that there can be no misunderstanding about the matter, that I have nothing but the highest regard for all members of organized crime. Some of my best friends are mobsters.
In fact, I have nothing against any of these groups. I love Canadians just as though they were real Americans. Penguins are my favorite birds, if you call that a bird. I love "The Sopranos." Unless that's the wrong thing to say, in which case I hate "The Sopranos." I can be flexible. If I were not a friend to Canadians, would I have married one? If I were prejudiced against members of organized crime, would I be eagerly planning to vote for one for President? If I didn't love penguins, would I have spent three summers in the Antarctic cleaning oil off penguins' feathers? (How was I to know that it was a natural protective covering that helps them survive those cold Antarctic summers?)
I hope that this has cleared up any confusion regarding my position. And now I would like to address you on another matter of little importance. Although the following item pertains to my "Programming Paradigms" column, there is some logic to placing it here, beyond the fact that I didn't manage to fit it into this month's "Paradigms."
A number of readers responded to my August column summarizing C.J. Date's recent book and drawing connections between Prolog and relational databases. Mostly they assured me that there were indeed strong parallels between Prolog/expert systems and the relational model. Leonid Spektor wrote that a relational database with SQL is really a kind of slow expert system engine, and that anything that can be done by a basic expert system can be achieved with a relational database and SQL. In the mid 1980s, he wrote, the Communications of the ACM Transactions on Biomedical Computing published several articles in which medical expert systems and relational databases with SQL were shown to achieve the same result, given a simple example. Although he doesn't say so, I'm assuming that this information has been suppressed for the past 15 years by the antiCanadian conspiracy. Michael D. Kersey had coincidentally been reexamining Prolog and had recently read Date's book when he saw my column. His research had led him to what he considered the obvious question: Why muck up the database with procedural business rules if instead you could use rules in Prolog, a language designed for describing relations? Three reasons, he concludes: transactions, ordering of results, and query optimization.
All of which could be added to Prolog. And would be, he might have added, if it weren't for the antiCanadian conspiracy. And David Mertz wrote to point out the amazing similarities between C.J. Date's book and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I'm sure you'll want to check this out for yourself. Now here's the relevance for this column: One of these three readers is a Canadian, one is a penguin, and one is a member of organized crime. Can you tell which is which?
Based on the extensive demographic research and focus group studies we do here at DDJ, I am able to say with certainty that 99,997 of you understood that that was a joke. The other three canceled their subscriptions after my Canadian column, but just in case they're sneakily reading somebody else's copy, let me make it perfectly clear: It is not true that one of those readers is a Canadian, one is a penguin, and one is a member of organized crime. That was a joke. You know, one of those things that you always have to have your friends explain to you?
Actually one of them is a Canadian, but to avoid offending anyone, I won't say which one.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com