Caterpillar

I've been talking some more about the advantages of a code database over the last few days. There are quite a few, and obviously I'm already sold. So why doesn't Caterpillar use a code database yet?

The answer to that is existing tooling. If you have a code database, then you need to build custom tooling to bridge the gap between code database and text files, or teach an existing editor how to edit the database, or build a completely custom editor. Either of these options would be a lot of work that I'd like to avoid for the time being.

So for now, Caterpillar does the traditional thing, and reads its code in text files. I'm pretty sure that sooner or later we'll arrive at a code database though. And I'm always keeping this in the back of my mind when making design decisions.