A Tyranny of Savants?
May 11, 2022 3:45:07 GMT -8
Post by Uncle Buddy on May 11, 2022 3:45:07 GMT -8
Hypothesis:
GEDCOM's greatest defenders are people who say that everybody uses GEDCOM wrong, and then blame those people for GEDCOM's inadequate results.
That's like handing a soldier a 200-year-old musket and sending him into battle. When he goes home to Mama in a body bag, just pin a note to the bag informing her that the boy fought badly.
It's like the movie Rain Man where someone drops a box of toothpicks and the savant counts the toothpicks correctly at a single glance. The GEDCOM defender is the savant. He's mastered GEDCOM so he can tell everybody else they're not trying hard enough because they count toothpicks so slowly.
We must not compare ourselves to savants who master GEDCOM as a hobby like the savant in Rain Man memorized the phone book. We should compare the average real-world results of GEDCOM in the hands of ordinary mortals to the results of SQL in similar hands, in terms of efficiently recording and delivering relationships among data.
This is not a cry of "It's not fair." The outcry is this: GEDCOM ain't computer code. It's a text file. Not only is it harder for computers to read text than binary code, it's many times slower. Many, many times slower. So in order to not have to rudely inform our savant friends that they are a minority of extremists controlling the fate of all genealogy, we grind our teeth for hours while our geniewares pretend to import data, with the final result, after all that waiting, a mess of semi-imported data stuffed just anywhere.
And the blame game starts all over: "The vendor didn't export or import GEDCOM correctly."
Maybe the vendor had better things to do.
GEDCOM's greatest defenders are people who say that everybody uses GEDCOM wrong, and then blame those people for GEDCOM's inadequate results.
That's like handing a soldier a 200-year-old musket and sending him into battle. When he goes home to Mama in a body bag, just pin a note to the bag informing her that the boy fought badly.
It's like the movie Rain Man where someone drops a box of toothpicks and the savant counts the toothpicks correctly at a single glance. The GEDCOM defender is the savant. He's mastered GEDCOM so he can tell everybody else they're not trying hard enough because they count toothpicks so slowly.
We must not compare ourselves to savants who master GEDCOM as a hobby like the savant in Rain Man memorized the phone book. We should compare the average real-world results of GEDCOM in the hands of ordinary mortals to the results of SQL in similar hands, in terms of efficiently recording and delivering relationships among data.
This is not a cry of "It's not fair." The outcry is this: GEDCOM ain't computer code. It's a text file. Not only is it harder for computers to read text than binary code, it's many times slower. Many, many times slower. So in order to not have to rudely inform our savant friends that they are a minority of extremists controlling the fate of all genealogy, we grind our teeth for hours while our geniewares pretend to import data, with the final result, after all that waiting, a mess of semi-imported data stuffed just anywhere.
And the blame game starts all over: "The vendor didn't export or import GEDCOM correctly."
Maybe the vendor had better things to do.