RE: [xml-dev] Re: SQL instead of XQuery [main]

["Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>]

>   I'm very wondered, that industry have not been thinking about
> non-programmers: i meet only one mention of this topic - in 
> publication of 1974: E.F. Codd and C.J. Date, "Interactive 
> Support for Nonprogrammers: The Relational and Network Approaches".
> They wrote (in 1974 !), that role of "random" users was 
> increasing greatly, and really these users soon would present 
> majority, 

Actually the designers of COBOL thought the same in the 1950s: COBOL was
intended to be written by business people, not by programmers. The notion
that non-programmers should be able to write programs, while inherently
self-contradictory, has been a goal for computer science ever since
computers were invented. The technology that came closest to success in this
was probably the spreadsheet (Visicalc). There are millions of
non-programmers, or at any rate self-taught programmers, writing code (often
rather bad code) in a wide variety of languages including Javascript, XSLT,
SQL, XPath and lots more. 

But as far as database query is concerned, ad-hoc end users do not write
code: they use simple form-filling interfaces, notably the
single-search-term Google query. The characteristics of such interfaces are
(a) there's no such thing as a syntax error, and (b) you don't need to know
the schema.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/