I believe the easiest way to think about it is to get away from your programming tools and to start modeling your problem domain as tables in excel.
Once you have a relational schema that the business can look at and understand, then you go implement it with whatever tools and techniques you see fit.
This is what “data-oriented” programming means to me. It’s not some elegant code abstraction. It’s mostly just a process involving people and business.
Even for non serious business, these techniques can wrangle complexity that would otherwise be insurmountable.
I still think the central piece of magic is embracing a relational model. This allows for things like circular dependencies to be modeled exactly as they are in reality.
This confused me as when I hear data-orientated I think data structures that are optimised around minimising CPU cache misses by using better alignments, using enums where possible, not storing results of simple calculations etc. There is a popular book and popular talks on the subject. Probably confuses other people as well I'd imagine
> I think data structures that are optimised around minimising CPU cache misses by using better alignments, using enums where possible, not storing results of simple calculations etc.
You might be surprised to learn that modeling your problem in terms of normalized relational tables ultimately achieves similar objectives. The more normalized, the more packed you will find their in-memory representations.
Once you have a relational schema that the business can look at and understand, then you go implement it with whatever tools and techniques you see fit.
This is what “data-oriented” programming means to me. It’s not some elegant code abstraction. It’s mostly just a process involving people and business.
Even for non serious business, these techniques can wrangle complexity that would otherwise be insurmountable.
I still think the central piece of magic is embracing a relational model. This allows for things like circular dependencies to be modeled exactly as they are in reality.