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The types of issues you're enumerating are really part of a learning curve that every language and environment will have. > not having basic functions for calc

• crazygringo 3y ago
  > The types of issues you're enumerating are really part of a learning curve that every language and environment will have. They're not though. That's why excellent coders often despise having to learn and use SQL, and basically just refuse to. SQL is uniquely terrible -- and I say this as someone with a career spanning from Win32 C++ to every major web technology. > every major database will have some percentile functions MySQL still doesn't. MariaDB only added it in 2018, and I've been writing queries for a lot longer than that. (And MySQL only added window functions in 2018 as well.) And remember that, for various reasons, you're often (usually?) stuck using a database engine in production that's several years old, since upgrading a database engine is not something to be taken lightly.
  • chrsig 3y ago
    > They're not though. That's why excellent coders often despise having to learn and use SQL, and basically just refuse to. SQL is uniquely terrible -- and I say this as someone with a career spanning from Win32 C++ to every major web technology. This is basically a strawman + appeal to authority argument. I've no desire to bicker. "Uniquely terrible" is quite subjective, we'll have to agree to disagree on if it applies to sql.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      Excuse me, but I'm certainly not "bickering" and I resent the insinuation. And you don't seem to understand what a strawman argument is. I'm not going to write an article on this for you, but you can certainly see the sentiment frequently expressed on HN that the rise of NoSQL and of ORM's is a direct result of otherwise capable programmers not wanting to deal with SQL and its conceptual building blocks such as joins. Take that for what you will, but you might suspect there's a reason for it, and that it's not merely the learning curve for "every language".
      • sgarland 3y ago
        I take it as the same reason they don’t want to use boring technology like HAProxy, or why they think infrastructure in general is beneath them: because they are easily influenced by breathless grifters on Medium promoting the New Thing. SQL isn’t going away any time soon. At its heart, it’s relational algebra. If you can learn DS&A, you can learn relational algebra.
        • rglover 3y ago
          FWIW, I love HAProxy but hate SQL (for the exact reasons the OC suggests). It turns the simple into soup and makes bugs more likely. Every single non-trivial usage of it I've seen in the wild has been a ball of spaghetti. I bought the learning curve argument for a long time until I finally realized: no, SQL is a victim of its own success. It's popular because it's popular, not because it's a superior language. That popularity has encouraged a gambling addict level of doubling down that continues to gaslight less-experienced developers into believing it's "the way." You're right that it isn't going away, but when it does, I'll be the first to dance on its grave.
      • SahAssar 3y ago
        > you can certainly see the sentiment frequently expressed on HN that the rise of NoSQL and of ORM's is a direct result of otherwise capable programmers not wanting to deal with SQL and its conceptual building blocks such as joins I think I saw that sentiment a lot 5+ years ago. The last 2-3 years have been a lot more for postgresql and writing SQL directly. Either way I don't think that "excellent coders" "despise" learning SQL, almost every senior coder that has interacted with a medium-to-large database has understood and valued SQL in my experience.
      • ak39 3y ago
        ORMs and NoSQL were a direct result of the desire to have an object-oriented data worldview in a programming landscape dominated by OO languages. They were not introduced because programmers didn’t want to learn SQL (implying incompetence etc).
      • garfij 3y ago
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    How many application languages have percentile functions?
    • setr 3y ago
      Nearly all of them, because any language designed in the last 30 years permits user defined libraries in trivial fashion, even amazingly letting you write those libraries in the same language you’ll use it. And even more incredibly, the libraries themselves can build on other libraries! (There’s even often a standard allowing libraries to be shared by different implementations … or rather, a standard that actually standardizes things beyond the language aesthetic) Databases follow the COBOL model of extensibility — tis for me and not for thee. It is only to be done by the vendor, and maybe some third party specialists
      • paulddraper 3y ago
        Every database I've ever used is extensible