Connectors and -Source, -Client or -Start ?

[Ian Mitchell]

Does anyone know why, when dealing with connectors, there seem to be 3 very similar- maybe identical - ideas:
-Client
-SourceID
-Start_Object_ID
(and their close friends, Supplier(!), Target and End_Object_ID. They define the two ends of a connector. Maybe the most fundamental idea in EA....

Last one is easy - that's the database column in t_connnector.
But to set it, we set connector.ClientID, not 'Connector.Start_Object_ID'.
OK, so the API names for columns names an their field names are sometimes different, but this is REALLY different.

And when thinking about the connector at a higher level, we seem to talk about Source and Target (or Destination).
Is this just a old bit of EA, which clearly can't be changed now, which Geoff did when he was much younger, or is there some deeper truth here I'm not seeing ?

Challenge for Q - say something positive about this....

[Geert Bellekens]

My opinion?

It's organically grown chaos.
That happens sometimes (I know because I'm guilty of stuff like that as well)

The difficulty of this case that it's really hard to change it after the fact because of all the dependencies.
If they would change one or the other, we would all be mad, because it breaks our scripts, searches, etc..

So I guess they (and we) just learned to live with it.

Geert

[Paolo F Cantoni]

My opinion?

It's organically grown chaos.
That happens sometimes (I know because I'm guilty of stuff like that as well)

The difficulty of this case that it's really hard to change it after the fact because of all the dependencies.
If they would change one or the other, we would all be mad, because it breaks our scripts, searches, etc..

So I guess they (and we) just learned to live with it.

Geert

You're right, Geert,
But "Systems" shouldn't be developed organically^[1]; they should be designed systematically.  One of my aphorisms is, "How can we claim to develop systems if we are not systematic in the process?".
As you say, we have been slowly heating up in the pot, and now we've boiled to use what's there.

For our part, above the physical level, we use only "Origin" and "Destination".

Paolo

^[1] Organically may seem generous.  Some might think to use a harsher adverb, "I couldn't possibly say that".

[Ian Mitchell]

Don't worry- I totally get that software this old, with this amount of change, will have some strange bits. Just checking that there was no hidden meaning.

[qwerty]

Organically

We all know the right word. Imagining G. sitting there coding some marvellous stuff that even has quite a number of clients willing to pay: "Who said Peopleware? DeMarco? I want' my next yacht!"

q.