>An intelligent system does not have to be inflexible. And "throwing"
>features at a product does not make it intelligent...

Did I say otherwise?

>Seems like Jim is saying he wants InterBase to be software that solves the
>problems at hand rather than creates jobs for DBAs.

That's the premise I agree with wholeheartedly. It's an ideal. BUT, this is
a real world with lots of flavors and evolutions of problems to solve. And,
unfortunately, we can't seem to get computers to the state where they solve
problems as dynamically, with forsight, etc. as intelligent, reasoning
humans can.

Problem solving requires a certain amount of creativity and computers don't
inherantly have a speck of it. They are great for repeating operations that
need to always be done a certain way with assurity, i.e. tools to apply
fixed given rules repeatedly.

This whole subject touches upon the balance we as developers maintain in our
careers. If Jim is to succeed in his ideals (which I personally would love
to see) you and I will most likely be out of a job even designing and
building a front-end interface for a database. It all requires creativity
and if you find a way to automate creativity a lot of us are in for a real
career shakeup.

It's the ability to "tune" features that *enables* creativity. Think of a
musician. What if a guitar only had a single string. What kind of music
could you create with it? Where would the harmony come from? It's nice to
have some tuning parameters because that gives the musician's creativity
more room to grow into. It's a balance between creativity and complexity.

I'm just saying that if there came a time where I couldn't get InterBase to
do something I needed it to do because its parameters were under the hood
untouchable I would have to go with another database product. I really,
really don't ever want to have to do that.

So far things have gone very well and I have good reason to believe that
things will remain sensible while ideals are being strived for... So, I'll
rest my case in that trust.

FWIW,
Jason Wharton
CPS - Mesa AZ
http://www.ibobjects.com

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