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This might surprise you, but a huge amount of business logic is already stored in databases etc rather than in text based code repositories. There are lots of e

This might surprise you, but a huge amount of business logic is already stored in databases etc rather than in text based code repositories. There are lots of enterprises that have platforms (e.g. Salesforce) that allow you to build things without code.

piaste 6y ago
Databases can usually be exported as, and rebuilt from, some kind of plain text format - be it CSVs, JSON, DDL+DML scripts. Of course it's less efficient than using the vendor's native dumps. But it's still important that the option exists, because it means that, in a worst case scenario, you can unfuck your data with text-based tools ranging from notepad to enterprise distributed buzzword ETL.
- jtwaleson 6y ago
  You can always figure a way to extract the logic, you will just need the runtime to execute it afterwards ;)
- kevincox 6y ago
  You can come up with a plain text format for any data. The more interesting question is the day to day use. Right now for most programmers we general work in an editor which does little over the text representation and sometimes edit the first directly as text. We also review code almost entirely as a diff of text. The only exception to this is that we break the text into multiple files and handle each somewhat separately. This is in start contrast to SAP or Salesforce where the primary interaction is with a specialized UI which treats the "code" more as a graph than text. And dumping to text is primarily used as a backup and is rarely interacted with in that form.
dogfoods 6y ago
Yes, lots of people do things that are bad ideas.
- jtwaleson 6y ago
  Portability isn't the holy grail. To create working products, a lot of other things are important too.
weltensturm 6y ago
These things are very vendor specific and proprietary, I was more thinking about general purpose programming languages.
IBorodin 6y ago
Also SAP stores a lot of business logic in the database.

piaste 6y ago

Databases can usually be exported as, and rebuilt from, some kind of plain text format - be it CSVs, JSON, DDL+DML scripts. Of course it's less efficient than using the vendor's native dumps. But it's still important that the option exists, because it means that, in a worst case scenario, you can unfuck your data with text-based tools ranging from notepad to enterprise distributed buzzword ETL.

jtwaleson 6y ago
You can always figure a way to extract the logic, you will just need the runtime to execute it afterwards ;)
kevincox 6y ago
You can come up with a plain text format for any data. The more interesting question is the day to day use. Right now for most programmers we general work in an editor which does little over the text representation and sometimes edit the first directly as text. We also review code almost entirely as a diff of text. The only exception to this is that we break the text into multiple files and handle each somewhat separately. This is in start contrast to SAP or Salesforce where the primary interaction is with a specialized UI which treats the "code" more as a graph than text. And dumping to text is primarily used as a backup and is rarely interacted with in that form.

dogfoods 6y ago

Yes, lots of people do things that are bad ideas.

jtwaleson 6y ago
Portability isn't the holy grail. To create working products, a lot of other things are important too.

weltensturm 6y ago

These things are very vendor specific and proprietary, I was more thinking about general purpose programming languages.

IBorodin 6y ago

Also SAP stores a lot of business logic in the database.