RE: Picking the Tools -- Marrying processing models to data model s

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@earthlink.net>]

5/23/01 8:13:36 AM, "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com> wrote:

>Yet editing a book on object programming last night, 
>I read three very serious authors insist on the 
>impersonality of design, the removal of individual 
>interpretation, and the *fact* that if one learns 
>objectThink, one realizes that all other desing forms are 
>inadequate.
>
>The need of some to reduce all to one method 
>is not mystifying.  It is rather blue.

Er, I think it's rather "gold," as in the classic "golden hammer" antipattern.

It's just a natural human tendency to want to have a few, or even a single, mental model(s) that 
encompass as much of reality as possible.  The problem is that when this tendency is carried to 
extremes, you wind up either with mental models that are as complicated as the reality itself and 
therefore aren't very useful, or with a set of cognitive distortions that attempt to shoehorn reality 
into a model that doesn't apply (not being able to see the parts of the territory that don't 
correspond to the map, or looking at the territory and seeing features that are really artifacts of 
the map--I'm reminded of the creationist who, on national TV, expounded a "theory" that involved 
large masses of ice being dragged southwards by gravity).