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SQL stood the test of time. SQL is widely adopted. Once you get the hang of it, it can be applied on a wide range of RDBMS. I would argue that countless produc

by a_c 7y ago

SQL stood the test of time. SQL is widely adopted. Once you get the hang of it, it can be applied on a wide range of RDBMS. I would argue that countless productivity has been lost to learning yet another query language for yet another NoSQL db. Mongo has its own query language. Cassandra has its own. Neo4j has its own. What not. Guess what, few engineers need these to solve their actual problem. Be it building an application, a library, a SaaS, a tool with wide database support. The yet another query language is an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem (most of the time). Your problem isn't big enough to use whatever NoSQL of choice. When developers starting out, they get attracted to technologies with the most marketing money. They beat around the bush of learning things that might not matter anymore 5 years down the road. Is english the best language? No, not even close. Should one learn it? Probably. Is esperanto a better language? I don't know, maybe. People invent it for a reason (a problem to solve) after all. Should one learn it? Probably no.

strbean 7y ago
> SQL stood the test of time. SQL is widely adopted. I'm highly dubious of "it is widely used so there" arguments. I think in the case of SQL, the fact that ORMs and SQL generators are ubiquitous are evidence that a huge proportion of engineers would rather not write it, and part of why it is still widely used (most of the time, most people can avoid actually touching it). > I would argue that countless productivity has been lost to learning yet another query language for yet another NoSQL db. Mongo has its own query language. Cassandra has its own. Neo4j has its own. What not. Guess what, few engineers need these to solve their actual problem. This is exactly one of the points I addressed in my comment... none of those are even relational databases. And this is where the discussion ends up every time someone says SQL sucks. > Is english the best language? No, not even close. Should one learn it? Probably. The vast majority of the time, when you are using English, you have no control over the receiving end. The vast majority of time, when you are using SQL, you / your org grabbed an SQL RDBMS to use. Furthermore, I don't see why a modern, reasonable query language couldn't transpile to SQL easily when necessary, making all path-dependency / adoption arguments void.

by a_c 7y ago

strbean 7y ago

> SQL stood the test of time. SQL is widely adopted. I'm highly dubious of "it is widely used so there" arguments. I think in the case of SQL, the fact that ORMs and SQL generators are ubiquitous are evidence that a huge proportion of engineers would rather not write it, and part of why it is still widely used (most of the time, most people can avoid actually touching it). > I would argue that countless productivity has been lost to learning yet another query language for yet another NoSQL db. Mongo has its own query language. Cassandra has its own. Neo4j has its own. What not. Guess what, few engineers need these to solve their actual problem. This is exactly one of the points I addressed in my comment... none of those are even relational databases. And this is where the discussion ends up every time someone says SQL sucks. > Is english the best language? No, not even close. Should one learn it? Probably. The vast majority of the time, when you are using English, you have no control over the receiving end. The vast majority of time, when you are using SQL, you / your org grabbed an SQL RDBMS to use. Furthermore, I don't see why a modern, reasonable query language couldn't transpile to SQL easily when necessary, making all path-dependency / adoption arguments void.