Software is not war

Ted Neward essays on the object-relational impedance software problem, needlessly drawing out his now famous one-liner that it is "the Vietnam of computer science." I don't like the analogy for two reasons:

1) Bad taste. In the Vietnam war, over a million people died, so seriously comparing it to the tensions in software system design is sophomoric, inappropriate, and silly.

2) Vietnam was a catastrophe; software talking to RDBMS's is by and large a success story. There are thousands of working software systems which have objects interfacing to relational databases. At most we are talking about the trade-offs, tensions, and shattered expectations experienced in this domain. Though there is no silver bullet which makes the impedance problem go away, it is not intractable, we have several general solutions.