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SQL is an amazing and very useful tool to work with. I will never understand why people want to abstract it away.

by xyzzy4 10y ago

lostcolony 10y ago
"SQL seems hard" "Here's a tool that makes it so you don't have to use SQL" "Great! Let's use that" - without having done the work to determine if that tool is actually any simpler (hint: it's not)
bradmwalker 10y ago
SQL needs marketing. Become obsolete unless you understand this durable persistence and functional, high-leverage reporting service!
busterarm 10y ago
I understand why they do, but I don't understand why more developers don't learn SQL. _it's freaking easy_!!! I become the defacto SQL guy at every job I work because other people don't want to touch it for some reason. I write SQL (or SOQL...ugh, Salesforce) virtually every day on the job (I do a ton of ETL in Ruby) and use it to give valuable business intelligence. Constantly I see other programmers jump through all sorts of technical hoops to get things done that could be done in a DB query quicker with more accuracy and less mental overhead. Just write your own toy ORM sometime. Copy the most-common functions of ActiveRecord. It's that easy. That's all it takes.
nicolas_t 10y ago
I use ORMs (ActiveRecord in Ruby, Sequelize in node.js) but I strongly believe that the only way to correctly use an ORM is to have a strong understanding of SQL. The ORM is useful in that it makes some things faster to write, makes my code cleaner but I will often revert back to SQL for critical operations that I need to be fast and I also know enough about how the ORM writes SQL to make sure that it doesn't do stupid queries. TLDR: ORMs are a good tool but must never be used to avoid learning SQL. An SQL knowledge is necessary to not shoot yourself in the foot.
PretzelFisch 10y ago
I think it's like javascript, when you had to use one language on the server then switch to something else on the client it lead to many years of trying to abstract html and javascript into java/c#... Maybe it would help if languages would allow for first class integration with sql like asp did for html

SQL is an amazing and very useful tool to work with. I will never understand why people want to abstract it away.

by xyzzy4 10y ago

SQL is an amazing and very useful tool to work with. I will never understand why people want to abstract it away.

"SQL seems hard" "Here's a tool that makes it so you don't have to use SQL" "Great! Let's use that" - without having done the work to determine if that tool is actually any simpler (hint: it's not)

bradmwalker 10y ago

SQL needs marketing. Become obsolete unless you understand this durable persistence and functional, high-leverage reporting service!

busterarm 10y ago

I understand why they do, but I don't understand why more developers don't learn SQL. _it's freaking easy_!!! I become the defacto SQL guy at every job I work because other people don't want to touch it for some reason. I write SQL (or SOQL...ugh, Salesforce) virtually every day on the job (I do a ton of ETL in Ruby) and use it to give valuable business intelligence. Constantly I see other programmers jump through all sorts of technical hoops to get things done that could be done in a DB query quicker with more accuracy and less mental overhead. Just write your own toy ORM sometime. Copy the most-common functions of ActiveRecord. It's that easy. That's all it takes.

nicolas_t 10y ago

I use ORMs (ActiveRecord in Ruby, Sequelize in node.js) but I strongly believe that the only way to correctly use an ORM is to have a strong understanding of SQL. The ORM is useful in that it makes some things faster to write, makes my code cleaner but I will often revert back to SQL for critical operations that I need to be fast and I also know enough about how the ORM writes SQL to make sure that it doesn't do stupid queries. TLDR: ORMs are a good tool but must never be used to avoid learning SQL. An SQL knowledge is necessary to not shoot yourself in the foot.

PretzelFisch 10y ago

I think it's like javascript, when you had to use one language on the server then switch to something else on the client it lead to many years of trying to abstract html and javascript into java/c#... Maybe it would help if languages would allow for first class integration with sql like asp did for html