The Resistance War of Computer Science

If the hardest thing in Computer Science is naming things, then a corollary rule is that misnaming things must be the easiest.

One of the more evocative similes in my field is Ted Neward’s notion that “Object/relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science.” It’s an analogy for the mismatch between the representation of data in object systems (in terms of OOP languages) and relational systems (i.e., relational databases) and the hazards of translating between them.

The thrust of the metaphor is that the O/R-M problem, like the Vietnam War, is a quagmire that might have started as planned but quickly got bogged down in complications with no solution and no exit strategy in sight.

It’s rueful to think on this problem from Hanoi, where the real Vietnam War was experienced from the opposing side, and known by another name entirely, as Kháng chiến chống Mỹ, or the Resistance War Against America.

Neward later acknowledged that his analogy might seem strained and even offensive. I don’t wish to defend it, or dismiss it. Nevertheless, an analysis of his argument, like the War itself, would benefit from a similar shift in perspective.

Neward’s stance on the O/R-M problem takes an object-oriented approach for granted, rather than deconstructing it; much like his metaphor of the Vietnam War assumes its name and meaning in an American context.

It has been over a decade since The Vietnam of Computer Science was published. In that time the industry has had a chance to learn its own lessons from history, such as the advantages of message-passing, share-nothing, process-oriented architectures (like Erlang) which make better object systems than OOP does; and functional languages which manipulate lists and sets of data in a way that is aligned with the operators of relational algebra.

Neward proposes one solution to the O/R-M problem that he can’t accept in the end, to give up on objects entirely. Ironically, it is the same conclusion that the U.S. came to in its prosecution of the war effort in Vietnam: abandonment.

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Christopher Adams is an artist and computer programmer based in Taipei.

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