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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • I still haven't worked out why outlines are da bomb.

    Reason #1: Dave has been writing outliners for 20 years. If outliners weren't da bomb, why would he have wasted so much of his life writing them (and made so much money selling them)?

    Reason #2: Microsoft grokked Outliners. Look at Word. Look at their market cap and their market share. Apple didn't grok Outliners. Look at MacWrite II. Look at their market cap and their market share. Any questions? (aside from the obvious one: Why won't Apple

    • Reason #3: Most structures are hierarchical, can be made to fit into a hierarchical format, or be gently eased into one. A list, for example, is a flat hierarchy.

      This is obviously it. Look at the huge success enjoyed by hierarchical databases like H-Oracle, Hibase, and MyHQL. Sure, it seemed threatened by that crazy "relational model" stuff a while back, but the hierarchical model, which maps so well onto most real world processes and data, was never really in danger.

      • Re:Outliners (Score:2)

        by ziggy (25) on 2002.04.15 19:38 (#7034) Journal
        Look at the huge success enjoyed by hierarchical databases like H-Oracle, Hibase, and MyHQL.
        Once you start talking about FOREIGN KEYS and entity-relationship diagrams, the hierarchical nature of data in a relational database starts to show through.

        It's just that the hierarchical model wasn't really easy to describe, generalize or optimize 30 years ago. Today the story is vastly different: witness the awe and power of native XML databases like...ah...er...um...well...nevermind. :-)

        Seriously though, it's a SMOP to convert between the flat and hierarchical. (Some vendors would look at their development budgets and argue on the "simple" part. :-) What really matters now is: which technique is more practical, and which technique is more natural?

        • Flat => Hierarchical is definitely not a big deal.

          Hierarchical => Relational is also relatively easy.

          Relational => Hierarchical is asking for a mess.
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