>At any rate, what do you mean by "programming"? In your best of all possible
>worlds, what would you like a physician to be able to do?
I think the first thing that physicians can work on with each other is a
task equivalent to or the same as creating relational table
definitions. [How do you do table definition type tasks in M, by the way.]
If physicians can define tables, or a functionally equivalent task, then
everything else is fairly straightforward.
But I know, having raised this possibility before, that the second one says
"table" on this list, all hell breaks loose. Well, if tables are not the
soup du jour, and some sort of middleware metadatadefinition is, then *just
translate the tables into that representation*!
The beauty of tables is that absolutely anyone can understand them. Not
everyone wants to sit down and write SQL statements, but everyone can *do
tables*.
On the other hand, tables actually contain very subtle data management
principles having to do with the normal forms. But this is the botany
piece (quoting Wayne). Everyone with a logical mind can get it.
I now ask you Greg, if someone handed you some table definitions that were
logically coherent, would it make your programming job easier in terms of
interfaces etc.
The additional thing about tables is that it is very easy to express and
capture standards with them in a way that everyone can understand.
So, in sum, even if tables are an anathema, get doctors to do tables using
extremely powerful visual tools and that's a start.
John
P.S. More anon.
