[Persistence-sig] getting started

[Guido van Rossum]

> >I dunno.  I personally believe there's a reason why few languages
> >standardize persistence, and why languages that do include persistence
> >have remained at the fringe at best.
> >
> >--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
> 
> Could you elaborate on why you believe so?
> 
> I know the technical hurdles will not be insignificant, and we have to be 
> careful not to try to come up with "THE ONE TRUE SOLUTION" that would be 
> supposed to solve everyone's problems. Personally, something like ZOPE, 
> with a few enhancements and guaranteed to work on any platform (read 
> pure-python), would go a LONG way ion the right direction.

Kevin Jacobs's posts here are an example of what I mean.  He wants to
map objects to relational databases, which is very different from
Zope.  Coming up with something that supports both sounds hard.

> More static languages like C++, Java, Eiffel etc.. will naturally have a 
> harder time creating versatile and easy to use persistence. That's where 
> python's dynamic nature should help us.

I don't know why you think that.  As long as a language has the
metadata describing its types at run-time, it should have no problem.
At least Java and (modern) C++ satisfy this condition; I don't know
enough about Eiffel but I'd bet that it also has considerable run-time
accessible meta-data.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)