The programmer as navigator

Copernicus completely reoriented our view of astronomical phenomena when he suggested that the earth revolves about the sun. There is a growing feeling that data processing people would benefit if they were to accept a radically new point of view, one that would liberate the application programmer's thinking from the centralism of core storage and allow him the freedom to act as a navigator within a database. To do this, he must first learn the various navigational skills; then he must learn the "rules of the road" to avoid conflict with other programmers as they jointly navigate the database information space. This reorientation will cause as much anguish among programmers as the heliocentric theory did among ancient astronomers and theologians.