Another datapoint of the power of declarative thinking

From: XRX: Simple, Elegant, Disruptive

(XForms on the client
REST interfaces
XQuery on the server)

"I was working on a project with real-estate transactions that had many associated complex real-estate forms. Traditional methods required approximately 40 inserts into separate tables within a relational database. The use of XForms and eXist resulted in one line of XQuery code:

store(collection, file, data)

That was it. Simple. Elegant.

I was hooked. After spending over 20 years building applications with a variety of procedural languages I found my preferred architecture. I have seen the power of XForms and eXist and can't conceive of returning to my procedural programming ways."

Building Heathrow

Heath Row was once a hamlet in the middle of the Middlesex countryside (bottom left, north east of Staines). As we know from Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's The Meaning of Liff, the phrase "Aird of Sleat" is the name of an ancient Scottish curse placed from afar on the stretch of land now occupied by Heathrow Airport.

The airport was built there in 1946, and in this amazing film from the period you can see just how unbelievably idyllic the surroundings once were before the curse took effect.