Re: [xml-dev] Topics of keen interest to me ... how about you?

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

I didn't hear it expressed quite like that.

I did hear someone talk about the significance in XML of freeing the data from the application code. I've sometimes called that "de-encapsulation". Encapsulating data -- not allowing access to data except via the application that understands it -- has been a common theme in object-oriented programming and is considered to have software engineering benefits. And there are benefits, for example allowing the data structure to be changed without affecting the user. The counter argument is that the application can get in the way, preventing the user getting access to their own data. The XML philosophy is to define the data in a way that's independent of any application: you could certainly describe that as making the data primary.

Interestingly, the database philosophy is also to expose the data - not its byte-for-byte representation, but its logical structure - to anyone who wants to write a SQL query to access it. Very often, however, database designers have created databases that are only intelligible to one application, rather than being usable via SQL query.

Whether there "needs to be a shift" is an open question. I think encapsulation has a role. XML is the public interchange form of the data, but there's no harm in an application ingesting it, creating its own internal encapsulated data structures, and hiding those.

Michael Kay
Saxonica



On 11 Aug 2013, at 15:34, Costello, Roger L. wrote:

> Hi Folks,
> 
> At the Balisage conference someone said:
> 
>      There needs to be a shift in programming: 
>      programming must be secondary and data 
>      must be primary.
> 
> I knew that. But I appreciated the reminder. It's easy to forget.
> 
> The topic is of keen interest to me. Reduce the amount of "telling the computer what to do," expand the amount of "here is some data."
> 
> I am keenly interested in data-driven programming. Create small programs that are driven by their input data. Change the input data, no change to the program.
> 
> I am keenly interested in assessing input data based on its complexity (in the formal language sense). Is the input data expressing a regular language? A context-free language? A recursive language? A recursively enumerable language?
> 
>      MIT quantum computing professor Scott Aaronson
>      says [1]: "By any objective standard, the theory of 
>      computational complexity ranks as one of the greatest
>      intellectual achievements of humankind -- along with
>      fire, the wheel, and computability theory."
> 
> I am keenly interested in understanding the implication of mismatches between the complexity of input languages and the computational power of input processors. If the input language is a regular language and its input processor is Turing complete, what are the implications? Any security implications? Could mismatches be exploited to do harm?
> 
> So, I am keenly interested in:
> 
> - How to design input languages and input-processing programs to create data-driven applications.
> 
> - Assessing the complexity of input languages; specifically, the complexity of XML vocabularies.
> 
> - Understanding the implications of a mismatch between the complexity of the input language and the computational power of the input processor.
> 
> Are these topics of interest to you? 
> 
> Have you done work in these areas?
> 
> Let's change the world.
> 
> /Roger
> 
> [1] http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus-Aaronson/dp/0521199565/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376230884&sr=1-1&keywords=scott+aaronson
> 
> 
> 
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