Exercises in Programming Style

VII

Data-Centric

When programming, the question What needs to happen? often makes us focus on functions, procedures or objects. The emphasis on algorithms in computer science reinforces that behavior first approach. However, many times it's more beneficial to think of data first – that is, focus on the data of the application, and add behaviors as needed. This is a very different approach to programming, and results in different programming styles. The next three chapters show three styles that place data first and computation later. The first one, Persistent Tables, is the well-known relational model; the other two fall into a category of styles known as dataflow programming.