> Isn’t this a plug for some sort of object oriented programming? No. You see the same thing happen in SQL database design. How you lay out the tables has a

> Isn’t this a plug for some sort of object oriented programming? No. You see the same thing happen in SQL database design. How you lay out the tables has a profound effect on the final application. Or indeed in database engines. Some use write behind, some write ahead, some log structured. In fact you can often predict how well they will do locking, perform on writes and mass inserts by knowing what datastructure they chose on day 1. Possibly the best examples are in source code control. Git won, yet git has a very ordinary API (command line interface). Git won because Linux used content addressable memory as his underling data structure, and it turned out to be an inspired choice. The other side of the coin is once you've decided on a data structure, it's often damned hard to change. Thus one Linus chose CAM, git was going to live or die on that choice. Once there were a few git repo's out there, changing it got very hard. Changing the API is not so hard: add a new one, depreciate the old one.