Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Table-oriented programming

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. - Mailer Diablo 06:40, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Table-oriented_programming

Table-oriented programming is a Neologism invented by the infamous Usenet troll Bryce Jacobs masarading as original research. It is ineligible on both counts. Bryce Jacobs is also known to use the alias TopMind and Tablizer .

• Delete as nominator--User:MartinSpamer 12:04 GMT 21st August 2006
  • AfD is not a vote - a nominator's rational is explained in the top and doesn't need to be reiterated in the discussion preemptively like this, it's bad form. WilyD 13:21, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
• Some things come up in researching this (in addition to the "Further reading" section of the article, q.v.) that appear to support the nomination: "He advocates something called Table Oriented Programming (TOP), that I've never heard of anywhere else.", "You can tell that this came from a DB head.", "Not only marketing speak, but Orwellian NewSpeak too: ignorance passing itself up for innovation.", "ah yes, the notorious "topmind" of comp.object, he of the non-terminating anti-OOP rants.". A lot of what is written about this turns out to be no more than copies of Jacobs' own web pages or entries in lists of people's bookmarks, moreover. Uncle G 14:23, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
  • also he refers to it as "My pet paradigm, Table Oriented Programming" - That seems to pretty much sum it up. Artw 14:40, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - Appears to be made up. And a bit crazy. Artw 14:29, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, get it published and cited first. Gazpacho 17:12, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
• Weak merge. Filtering out any contributions (either to the article, or to the references) that were penned by Topmind and not vetted by peer review--there may be enough left to merge into an existing relational article (which one, I don't know--Object-Relational impedance mismatch might be a good bet). The use of relational tables and such as a dispatching mechanism predates Topmind; and there do appear to be at least one or two cites to reliable sources on the matter. I won't comment here on the merits of Top's ideas (I've commented quite a bit elsewhere), but the merits don't matter for this discussion. Topmind's theories don't appear to be embraced by anybody but Topmind and are for that reason not encyclopedic, Wikipedia is not for "pet theories" and stuff made up in school one day (or even over the course of several years). --EngineerScotty 17:50, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

• Although the principal proponent, specific terminology, historical pedigree and background of this article may be considered questionable (at least by some), some of the underlying principles do have independent merit. Certain aspects of "table-based" or "query-based" (or choose another term) programming methodologies have gained serious formal consideration beyond just the narrowly focused interests of one individual. For example, the introduction of LINQ into the CSharp programming language represents one noteworthy example of "table-based" or "query-based" concepts used to augment an established programming language. It would seem this article (or a more neutrally-presented, better cited version thereof) deserves some consideration at least on that basis.--Dreftymac 20:48, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

• Neutral: I am with Dreftymac here. The concept of using tables (relations, decision tables, ...) as the main structuring tool is employed in the real world though it doesn't have a catchy name as OOP. Having an overview article comparing OOP and other methodologies with TOP (whatever the name) would be ideal. (The OR-mismatch article is too specialized for this.) The current text is not much informative and deleting it would make little loss.

I am not aware of anyone else but Topmind propagating use of the term "table oriented programming". It is, however, quite fitting term (compare with "concurrency oriented programming" invention by Erlang designers) and due to the trolling became known among those methodologists reading comp.object. Pavel Vozenilek 20:44, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.