Sometimes we make things more difficult for ourselves than they really need to be. Programmers are no exception to this. For example, those of us of an object-oriented persuasion devote time and expertise to creating a model of a problem domain in terms of objects. We produce solutions that model real-world objects and that are highly extensible and reusable. And then we decide that we need those objects to stick around after the program stops, so we go ahead and create another, totally different model, just so that we can use a database. Our carefully designed objects are then chopped and...