> Does the proliferation of medical specialties indicate a problem? Ivan Illich certainly thought so: http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf http://akkartik.name/illi

> Does the proliferation of medical specialties indicate a problem? Ivan Illich certainly thought so: http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf. And he said a lot of useful stuff in my opinion. But I don't know enough to have an opinion of medicine. I find it useful in my experience. I wasn't saying the connection between my observation and conclusion is ironclad in all situations. But I do hold the heuristic opinion in the one case I mentioned. > The set of engineers who could do what SQL allows without it is quite small. If SQL disappeared tomorrow, a thousand equivalent implementations would appear tomorrow because it delivers real value. How much of this argument is about idealized SQL and how much about MySQL or its equivalents? I was careful to draw a distinction. SQL the language/mindset is incredibly valuable. EF Codd thoroughly deserves his Turing Award. You don't need to persuade me that MySQL lets us do things faster. What would really persuade me is an argument that it helps us do the right things. I think it makes it easy to scale past our level of competence.