Urdhva Dhanurasana

As time goes on, one finds an affinity for certain words. I'll skip the naughty ones here.

A couple of articles seen recently bring one such to mind.

First, this piece on simple-talk.
Second, this piece from Artima.

To quote Groucho, "Say the secret woid and divide $100". Today's secret word is: orthogonal.

The point of the RM, although not often stated explicitly, is that data thingees are independent of one another, and therefore can be added and subtracted without side effects. If by side effect one means breaking code not associated with the changed schema. Since the data is internally independent, changed data (structure/schema) can't break other data.

This is the essence of orthogonality. If one designs applications with independence always foremost, one can avoid all manner of LoC and errors. The NoSql folk, as their COBOL/VSAM brethren before them, seek to maximize LoC and thus errors. I swear by the Great Jehovah, most code these days is actually written in the debugger. Knuth would not be proud.

I've no recollection who to cite, but "one fact, one place, one time" is a more familiar statement of the proposition.

About the title. It is the Sanskrit for the Wheel Pose in yoga. Not, to say the least, orthogonal.