Sun rejects orthogonal persistence for Java

[Rob Jellinghaus]

At 09:41 PM 9/15/1999 -0700, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>>>http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr.html
>>>
>>>Look down the list for proposal JSR-000020.  It's the one proposal in the
>>>list which was not ACCEPTED.  Hmm, wonder why?????
>>
>>Actually, I still wonder why.  Do you have any reason to believe they 
>>rejected this for the right reasons?

Oh, goodness, now you've got me wondering if I even know what the right
reasons *are*!  :-)  Seriously, I have no idea why they rejected it.  They
don't say, which is disappointing.  What would be the *wrong* reasons to
reject it?

I know how much trouble we ran into at EC with trying to do rapid code
development without practical tools for updating persistent instances in
tandem with changes to their classes' code; to my mind, schema evolution is
the killer issue with orthogonal persistence at the language level.

I am now looking at the papers down near the bottom of
http://www.sunlabs.com/research/forest/com.sun.labs.pjw3.main.html
which talk about practical experience handling code updates in persistent
Java object stores... don't yet know what they've come up with.  (At a
glance, not much.)

This begs the question of whether orthogonal persistence at the language
level is *conceptually* wrong, by some nebulous argument relating to
information hiding from your future self... i.e. you don't ever want to
tell the future you anything more than you have to about what you are doing
now, since what you are doing now is so very likely to be wrong.  Hmm,
temporal information hiding???  This concept just occurred to me, so please
pardon its half-bakedness.

Cheers,
Rob