Does anyone really know what they are missing until they try it?

A few of my friends were recently talking about their favorite fruits when another friend walked up and said he avoided all fruits.  His rationale was that fruits were bad for you, and don't taste good anyhow, so we would all do well to stop eating these fruits.  Of course we told him he was very wrong and that fruits are not only very tasty, but also very healthy and part of a balanced diet.  It turns out that this fellow had a bad experience once a very long time ago with some fruit that caused him to get a little sick.  Now he is convinced, without a doubt, that all fruit must therefore be very bad for you, not to mention that all fruits taste bad.  I thought it would be easy to point out all the scientific evidence that claims to prove fruit is actually very healthy for you, but his personal "proof" was that he was very healthy without fruit, so even if it wasn't unhealthy it also wasn't of any value.

Now if you knew this fellow you would get a good laugh since he's extremely overweight and out of shape from eating lots of junk, but so far he hasn't had to go to the doctor or hospital with any major problems -- but we know its probably just matter of time.  So we next tried to encourage him to just try some fruits for himself, since this would prove quite well how tasty they really are, and then given time he would also come to realize that they were quite good for him too -- but he's convinced he knows far better.  Its easy to just leave him be, but we also really believe this fellow is in very bad shape, even if he doesn't realize it himself -- so what should we do?  We can't make him try some fruit, but I suppose we can continue to give him evidence fruit is healthy, and wouldn't we be very poor friends if we let him continue in his unhealthy ways, especially since he has a family to care for.

P.S.  The subject of this story was changed to protect the innocent -- the real story was about o/R Mappers and business objects.

6 Comments

  • Ok, since this is about me, I'll chime in and just ask if I am really suppossed to believe that ORM is appropiate for everything. ORM is a level of abstraction. Abstraction is good assuming it does not cause additional problems. ORM is not fruit. I would view ORM as more of a fruit bar. Is buying a fruit bar better for you than growing your own fruit? In a busy lifestyle, the answer is that it depends. Sometimes it makes sense to buy the fruitbar, sometimes it makes sense to buy the fruit. In my case, i took over an application that has a home built orm component. the hborm is VERY slow. Are all orm products as bad as the hborm that I am stuck with? No. Should I use orm everywhere? No.



    BTW, I have to live with the hborm just about every day.



    Due to the fact that I am currently onsite, my emails only go out about twice a day. As I said (will say) to Craig Shoemaker on the subject, I have added ORM to my list of things to look at, the problem is that there is not much time for the list.



    Wally



    PS. I hope that Paul doesn't take anything I saw out of context. Paul is a guru, more than I ever will be. He is someone that I have always respected and I will always respect. I have always considered him a friends since the day I meet him about 3 years ago. I will continue to do so. :-) He knows more about ORM (and many other technologies than I ever will). And I just love the google ads ont he right hand side of the post.

  • The suggestion that ORM's are like fruit implies that we need them to be healthy. If that were the case, wouldn't we all be dead at this point in our careers from not using them?



    It's an interesting technology and technique, yes, but I've not encountered an instance where I need it. Some people will, some poeple won't. It's all good.

  • I don't understand why some people even bothered to switch to .NET in the first place. They probably were quite able to get everything done in regular ASP and VB6 to begin with. So why bother to switch to something just because it can make you more productive and yield code that's far more maintable?

  • So, does this make dblib like Doritoes?

  • When I saw fruit for the first time I knew instinctively that it was very healthy. However, my first bite was absolutely disgusting, and made me sick also. These were early days though, and I hadn't read much about fruit, and certainly didn't know there was such a variety. Anyhow - even though my first experience was bad, and I choose a different variety - a species I saw in your orchid, and my second experience was wonderful. I use fruit in almost every meal I prepare now, and it makes the meal more delicious and nourishing for everyone.

  • I'm currently working on an open source project (with legacy code) that uses the provider model to abstract away data access. There's one table in particular that uses around 10 stored procs to grab records from it and display it in a variety of ways.



    I recently added a couple columns to that table, modified 10 stored procs and all the methods that call those stored procs. Luckily we only have one concrete provider, otherwise I'd have to make the corresponding changes in every single one.



    This has pretty much convinced me of the efficacy of tools such as yours. Now its a matter of finding one that works well with an open source project.

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