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"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing." —Philip Greenspun, http://blogs.la

• Xichekolas 18y ago
  While I'd agree with Lisp and Haskell, I not sure how SQL could be considered that dense. I often find myself frustrated that a split second thought takes so long to express as a query, and I type a decent 80wpm or so.
  • henning 18y ago
    I always assumed he was referring to complicated ad-hoc queries that involve all kinds of joins and so forth. If I understand you correctly, yes, typing "select ... from ... where id = ..." would get old very fast.
    • Xichekolas 18y ago
      Well I was actually talking about writing queries that involve a join or two. Thinking to myself "I can get this by grabbing all these via joining on that where x = y" doesn't take very long, but typing that out can be annoying if you do it often enough. Of course, if you are constantly writing 8-way joins with fun things like group_concat in the select clause, I guess it would require a little more thought than typing. Also, I'd imagine the people that spend their days writing stored procedures, triggers, and the like spend more time thinking than typing, but I can't claim to be one of those people.