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Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

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Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#501
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that I'm at a company that I haven't had to use SQL. I don't know if I could even find a relational database here. But in a classic meme sense: "It isn't you I hate SQL, it's what I have to think about when I use you." I don't want to spend my time thinking about database indexes, query plans, or other complicated bits. I just want to get my data out. Sometimes I struggle, and I'd give anything for a plain inn…

I still teach SQL, via SQLite, as a first language to students, even though in practice I do 90% of my data analysis through the command line or Pandas. But SQL is very direct and clear as a language, and the overhead of SQLite is...well, light. Making an index is just one more line of code that for many datasets, you run once and never touch again. What do you find simpler in terms of data querying and management?

I kind of inferred this, rather than outright stating it, but I like SQL. The concepts are elegant, the language is a little kludgy but not obscene. I can never really remember the semantics of left, right, outer and inner joins, but I usually don't want missing data so inner all the way.

It's not SQL I dislike, it's that it means I'm using a database, and I've lost more of my life than I care to admit to in planning, designing, and maintaining databases so that they perform under production pressures.

Re: Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?

#502
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much existing at the fringe of performance, but there have been weeks of my life lost to needing to tune a query or an index. Sure, some of that time is actually building the index I just added. But I don't want to have to figure out a query plan. If I'm building a simple CRUD app, then I don't need the complexity that SQL provides. If I'm building something bigger, then I probably need to think about the…

MSSQL has one: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176005(v=sql.1... Postgres has explain and some third parties make query tuners. Oracle has a host of third party tunes, Solar Winds being the first that comes to mind. I don't know if any of these can do it off a proposed schema but you could create a dummy database and your insert/read routines run a script against it to simulate transactions and run the…

The worst of my time was using Oracle, around 2008. Back then SolarWinds was just a consulting company. And I don't really do much relational work anymore. A lot of my stuff ends up being documents with simple keys organized in hierarchical ways, and the few relational things I do are easily handled with that model, and wouldn't justify an actual database.

Why should I have to know what a table spool is and why they're bad?

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