[elephant-devel] 4th European Lisp Workshop

[Ben]

this is an entirely anecdotal remark, not really relevant, but one of
the original inspirations for elephant was a database system that was
used in-house at a company i was at with andrew blumberg and other
lisp hackers.  i was doing java crap and was a complete lisp neophyte,
and was amazed to see "change-class" in action.  that was a disrupting
experience.  also, i had been worried about the object-relational
impedance mismatch for a while.  BDB-backed elephant was a way to get
persistence without a table structure, and hopefully reap some
benefits in flexibility.  the original target applications were web
stuff and a mother-of-all-email-clients which never materialized.

i still think writing a ZODB-like backend would be a good idea,
especially given sleepycat's licensing issues.

take care, B

On 4/11/07, Pierre THIERRY <nowhere.man at levallois.eu.org> wrote:
> Scribit Robert L. Read dies 09/04/2007 hora 18:43:
> > However, if someone else can go, I am also happy to help or to
> > co-author a paper with them.
>
> It occurred to me that the combination of persistence and the MOP goes
> far beyond anything else I know in terms of flexibility WRT to the data
> model.
>
> That is, even a powerful macro system to build code that accesses a DB
> sets in stone the data model at compile-time. But a persistence library
> based on the MOP can bring to stored data the dynamic nature of CLOS,
> and you could completely change how data is organized, while the
> application runs, without having to build a migration tool, even if this
> process is automated (which is hard, I suppose), like cl-migrations.
>
> Like Erlang, Common Lisp enables a system to remain live while being
> updated at the code level. An Elephant-like persisence library enables a
> system to remain live while being updated at the data model level also,
> almost for free.
>
> I think this could easily make a short paper, maybe even a long one. I
> will try to write a first draft of it, and probably ask for help at some
> point.
>
> Quickly,
> Pierre
> --
> nowhere.man at levallois.eu.org
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