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by russellperry 5527 days ago
Anyone who thinks programming with tables is a neat idea hasn't had to write a complex Windows Installer/MSI deployment.

The horror...the horror...
1 comments
russellperry 5527 days ago
Not knocking OP's efforts as a nifty academic excercise -- good stuff. But MSI is a real world (admittedly MS) attempt at writing imperative instructions into relational tables.

And, again...<shudder>

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emilis_info 5526 days ago
Humble is about writing HTML tables, not database tables! :-)

I haven't tried developing MSI installers, so haven't experienced the horror.

One more area where I saw tables used for describing processes was keyword driven testing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyword-driven_testing Didn't have enough experience with it so don't know if it is also horrific...

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russellperry 5526 days ago
Sure, but in my experience the challenge of describing imperative instructions with tabular data (in general) makes the Object/Relational problem look one-dimensional.
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