Posted by --CELKO-- on 07/31/07 21:01

>> I wasn't talking about passing many parameters, I was talking about passing one parameter that can have many values. <<

No, it cannot have many values bey definition. Parameters have to be
a scalar value. At one point in ANSI we talked about passing tables
in the SQL/PSM and decided against it. Defining comparisons, the
parameter declarations and constraints, use of VIEWs, etc. made SQL
injection look like a blessing.

>> A drop-down list where the user can select more than one value. <<

Gee, I looked all over my SQL Standards and books, but could not find
a drop-down list mentioned. Are you sure that is not part of the
front end and not something which a good programmer would in the
database :)?

>> This is an EXTREMELY common scenario in the real world. <<

Yes, in the applications side of the real world, not the database.
Hey, there is nothing wrong with being an application programmer. But
it is a different tier.

>> Classroom coders who have little to no development experience in the real world tend to panic at the thought of examples that are outside of their limited experience :b <<

LOL! I have been gathering "limited experience" for over 35 years
now! And I have had some influence on RDBMS over the last few
decades. Instead of being a "code monkey" any more, I get called in
to train progammers, design DBs and repair disasters. Part of me
misses the programming discipline of a military weapons or medical
records system. If it screws up even a little or if it goes down, the
wrong people die.

You mention the pull-down list. When I was in Salt Lake City, I did a
little volunteer work for an African relief group. They drop medical
supplies into war zones. You cannot drop large cargo crates because
they will be captured or shot down before they can be gathered up.
Instead, you parachute small crates so that x-% will be delivered
(good math problem! My first Masters was in Math).

But that means the crates have to be packed with smaller units of
supplies. The suppliers were willing to give donations in larger
packages (i.e. 10,000 boxes of 100 units of an antibiotic in one cargo
crate). Volunteers would then break that into smaller units by hand;
a hell of a lot of manual labor.

The suppliers then agreed to provide packages of 10 units, so the
volunteers could put relief packages together without opening,
counting and re-packing 10 units in homemade containers from 100 unit
packages.

A volunteer programmer did a pull-down list where the package options
were in a comma separated list column in the DB. It made his display
easier. But it messed up the pick list when smaller units were
available. People thought they were asking for 100 units, but it
became 10 units in the backend.

His little violation of 1NF and blending of tiers meant that field
medical personnel had to decide which children would and would not get
antibiotics.

We have to find the shortages (or overages -- just as bad) and get
corrections for them into the field. Then we needed a smarter
volunteer programmer who could do it right.

That is a day in the life of "Classroom coder"; so what did you do
today?

An observation from decades of experience: the **average** programmer
is getting worse. Kids with no University degree, no accounting
courses, no statistics course, no comp sci courses, no nothing are
taking a cram course for an MS certification to get jobs. The jobs
being outsourced are going to non-English speakers who are just as bad
or worse!

In the old days, the hardware was expensive and you had to apprentice
for years under someone before you got to do production code. Now,
machines are cheap and "code monkey" programmers are not regarded as a
skilled employee. Enough monkeys on a keyboard can produce something
and if it is cheap enough and failure is not lethal, what the heck!

You might want to Google up http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html

It is a 1999 article in the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology by Justin Kruger and David Dunning entitled "Unskilled and
Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence
Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments"

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