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From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re:  Degree 3 consistency
Message-ID: <18182UH2@PSUVM>
Date: Mon, 10-Aug-87 09:53:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: PSUVM.18182UH2
Posted: Mon Aug 10 09:53:04 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Aug-87 00:53:44 EDT
References: 1215@smokey.UUCP
Organization: The Pennsylvania State University - Computation Center
Lines: 23

In article <1215@smokey.UUCP>, garyp@cognos.uucp (Gary Puckering) says:
>
>The jury is still out, though, on whether these systems can ever
>outperform "classical" database systems.  (I hope they can, I think
>they can, but I don't *know* they can!)
 --
 Knowing that they can will be hard to establish.  The ideal experiment
would be to give about 50 different teams of professional programmers
a big project to do, and let them use several differnt approaches,
assigned randomly, and include a year for training for each team,
and then see which teams (a) finish first, (b) finish best, (c) write
fastest code, etc etc etc.
     
Ah!  This is a 50 million dollar study, and not even the Pentagon will
fund it.
     
The earliest place where this problem was discussed, that I know of, is
Gerald Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming.  He did lots
of little studies of students programming, and bemoaned the fact that
we'll never be able to study *real programmers*.
     
Oh well.