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HOME >> OPINIONS

Letters to the Editors: Women in IT

By SD Times News Team

December 15, 2008 — What a great article by guest columnist Lori MacVittie. In “Sexist and Offensive,” she hit every point dead on. I couldn’t agree with her more.

Activists are always looking for external factors that might explain why fewer women than men are in the IT world, yet they overlook the most obvious [reason]. Many women just aren’t interested in IT. And IT is a career that demands you really love the field to succeed.

I’ve been in IT for over 20 years, and I’ve seen the changes. In the 1980s, there were virtually no women in IT. During the 1990s, there was a big push to get women into the field. It didn’t work. Yes, more women got into IT for a while, but they weren’t interested in IT technology, did poorly, lost interest and left.

What we have now, in the 21st century, are women who are in IT because they love IT. They perform just as well as men—and, in many cases (based on recent experience), better.

Michael Adams

Databases are not apps
While I confess to knowing little about the specifics of frameworks such as the Java Persistence API [“SQL still serves"], as one who was comfortable with SQL long before learning any object-oriented language, I have always viewed technologies that aim to blend database definition and manipulation with application development tools as a curiosity.

Beyond the similarity of eliminating redundancy—OO development resembles normalizing code, much as database development normalizes data—I find little in common between the development of good databases and the development of good applications.

I have worked with nightmarish applications whose databases were designed solely from the perspective of the application developer, with little thought given to how the information in the database relates to itself or to the real-world entities it represents. What would prevent reliance on these blended tools from leading to the same scenario? Like roads and cars, databases and applications are largely useless without each other, but there is no reason to think that either pair can be developed and maintained optimally using the same tools.

I admit that bad embedded SQL isn’t flagged by a compiler, but even Java code that goes through the compiler cleanly has to be tested. And I’m sure that even the best of these frameworks can’t be trained to squeeze the power and performance out of a database that I can get with hand-tooled SQL.

On second thought, maybe they do have some utility. Go ahead and encourage my competitors to use them.

Kevin Rahe

Related Search Term(s): databases, Java, professional development, SQL

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SQL still serves
When it came to database programming, SQL was supposed to give way to other languages. But new technologies, such as LINQ, JPA, and improvements to SQL itself have allowed it to persist as the language of choice in this field Read More...

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