3 ms·
To quote Feynman, "what I cannot create, I do not understand".
by willtim 7y ago
To quote Feynman, "what I cannot create, I do not understand".
- jister 7y agoSo in order for you to develop a payroll system you first need to know how to create a database?
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y agoThat’s what they say, if they require a CS degree to work there.
- elyseum 7y agoWell, to write a high performance payroll system with lots of concurrent users it helps a lot to know how the database you’re using works internally.
- commandlinefan 7y agoWell, yes, you should know _how_, even if you’ve never actually taken the time to do it.
- wolco 7y agoIf you are making a commericial product that features an in-memory database that can store non-standard types of data perhaps. More often than not you would just use an existing product if you are not going to add any value.
- bo1024 7y agoYou have the quote slightly wrong, in order to understand a payroll system you first need to know how to create a database.
- ryanmarsh 7y agoKnowing how a database is constructed and having to building one for the project are two different things. Yes friend, if a database is a major component of your system you should know how it works under the hood. They’re quite complicated and impose significant constraints on the system you’re building.
- parentheses 7y agoThere are situations where one uses a full featured abstraction like a database without needing to understand fully or modify it's internals. This is simply not one of them. This is a situation where building a new applications with handmade layers that produce the outcome you want is more efficient than gluing together existing code. You're coming at a complex problem by initially filtering the solution space. This discards much of the potential solution space for which the average case may be more expensive than The average case in the space after culling. However in many situations that solution space has many gems which are more efficient. Companies' tolerance to selecting those rather than using existing technology varies.
- ivanhoe 7y agowith the current state of technology and the speed of it's progress, there will always be much more things that you don't understand than those that you do...
- willtim 7y agoWith regard to the details sure, but the fundamentals should be studied and understood. That's why this blog is not attempting to recreate the entire of Microsoft Excel.