The Impedance Mismatch is Our Fault

Reference: The Impedance Mismatch is Our Fault

Stuart Halloway continues the world-round campaign of iconoclastic and well-argumented presentations that spring from Clojure's programming model and now Datomic's architecture. Stuart gives hard-hitting, reasoned practices that make our software better in measurable ways.

This is just one of the many ways Clojure is having (and will have) a huge impact on programming in any language. Immutable data by default is obvious. A model of time, while not so obvious, will seem like manual memory management does now. Sure, you can work with it, but who would give up garbage collection? Similarly, having a better model of state change (transactional or otherwise) enforced by the language will be something we will not want to live without.

Separating data from code will take years, maybe a generation, to catch on. Our field has drilled the Java model of Object-Orientation into students for years. But the change has already started. Though not being led by Clojure, JSON is now a universal data format accepted by nearly every language, and the fact that the standard does not allow code in JSON is significant.

But this talk goes a little further and proposes that we think of databases differently. Stuart does a good job of breaking down why OO and RDBMS don't fit well together, and proposes a solution that leaves them both in the dust.

Enjoy.