I'm thinking on how to rewrite that. My aim was to say that when we communicate to non-engineers, it should be imprecise and more sales pitchy.
When we need to sell our ideas. It doesn't help us to build an awesome taxonomy when we need to sell the right tool. More often enough, when we try to get precise with non-engineers, it owns us. It creates the need for a manager to organize the cats.
If we were precise, then we would have 10+ movements. a "column store" movement. A document movement. A map reduce movement.
Who the dick is selling anything? I thought we were building things. Call it DongDB, I don't give a damn, I just need to push some shit that's not going to break.
It does not matter what we call the products or the product category or the "movement". Products are built on technology, and the vast majority of the technology in the NoSQL space is pre-existing and appropriately named. A column store is a column store, not a CassandraStore(tm). A bloom filter is a bloom filter, a vector clock is a vector clock, consistent hashing is consistent hashing, ad nauseum. Those who are actually interested in understanding the tools spend their time reading technical and academic documentation that describes the foundation, building blocks, patterns, and concepts that are in play.
What matters for products is not what they are called, but whether they will work or not for your problem set. The best way to help this "movement" is to write code, run code, and provide examples, use cases, and data about real world environments that will help people choose the appropriate tools and approach to manage their data. Compared to actually using and building things, chatting it up about terminology isn't going to make a god damn bit of difference. Which is to say, get things done or shut up.
It doesn't help to build something if you can't sell it.
The NoSQL movement could be called a marketing and sales effort to sell people those ideas that you listed. Just because you know what vector clocks and consistent hashing mean doesn't mean that all the managers and all the technical directors in the world do.
Speaking as an engineer, there is great value in being imprecise.
Think of it as a shallow search. When we start a conversation, I first want you to be overview-y and high-level. Then I will (or you will) steer the conversation into the direction where more detail is required.
Wouldn't want a conversation polluted with unnecessary detail. It would drag on forever and bore even the most engineering of minds ... but damn it would be precise!
I'm an engineer and I agree with Swizec and mathgaldiator. As an engineer I see great value in abstracting layers until any specification or detail is needed. If NoSQL as a term helps me convey a meaning of "newish edgy non relational datastore" then the term serves it's purpose, the same way people used Web 2.0 to describe pretty gradients, huge plasticky buttons, and shinny bubble navbars.
It may seem like a fad to most people but it still is the easiest, shortest way to describe a group of aesthetics, use cases, or features in only one word. Think of it this way: We do it all the time with races, skin colors, and religions. White, Black, Muslims, Christians, Latinos, Asians... RDMS, and NoSQL...
I'm thinking on how to rewrite that. My aim was to say that when we communicate to non-engineers, it should be imprecise and more sales pitchy.
When we need to sell our ideas. It doesn't help us to build an awesome taxonomy when we need to sell the right tool. More often enough, when we try to get precise with non-engineers, it owns us. It creates the need for a manager to organize the cats.
If we were precise, then we would have 10+ movements. a "column store" movement. A document movement. A map reduce movement.