first normal form or death

[Raoul Duke]

a little bird told me about a code base that has a lot of structs and
classes and they tend to repeat things and bundle / wrap / associate
bits of information in similar-but-different ways all over the place
as a big ball of fractally excremental mud that has grown over time
and suddenly oh there's a desire to be able to convert among some of
those things and frankly it is a ton of junk and not at all easy or
clear or safe or sane to try to add that kind of conversion all over
the place as that grows to try to bandaid over the fact that the whole
model is crap.

i feel like, off the cuff, it would be better to have things in a
first normal form relational style and then have views on top of it
for the various use cases so that you have a slightly better chance of
avoiding acreting crappy design.

of course that's a bit of a joke itself because i have worked on
plenty of databases that were themselves full of dead ends and old
paths and reference and semantically too similar information spread
out in various corners of the schema.

basically it is a hard thing to do well, and apparently we're all too
busy to even try, and there are no grown ups around either.

[Raoul Duke]

and there should be static type driven automagic tooling to help make all this impedance mismatch de/seralization etl type random junk easy.