Charles W. Bachman
ABSTRACT
Copernicus completely reoriented our view of astronomical phenomena when he suggested that the earth revolves about the sun. There is a growing feeling that data processing people would benefit if they were to accept a radically new point of view, one that would liberate the application programmer's thinking from the centralism of core storage and allow him the freedom to act as a navigator within a database. To do this, he must first learn the various navigational skills; then he must learn the "rules of the road" to avoid conflict with other programmers as they jointly navigate the database information space.
This reorientation will cause as much anguish among programmers as the heliocentric theory did among ancient astronomers and theologians.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
The pdf contains a postscript for the recipient of the 1973 Turing Award.
Index Terms
- The programmer as navigator
Recommendations
The programmer as navigator
This year the whole world celebrates the five-hundredth birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer and mathematician. In 1543, Copernicus published his book, Concerning the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres, which described a new ...
System level concurrency control for distributed database systems
A distributed database system is one in which the database is spread among several sites and application programs “move” from site to site to access and update the data they need. The concurrency control is that portion of the system that responds to ...
Machines and the face of ethics
In this article I try to show in what sense Emmanuel Levinas' `ethics as first philosophy' moves our ethical thinking away from what has been called `centrist ethics'. Proceeding via depictions of the structure of Levinasian ethics and including ...
Comments