Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. Everyone wants to use the latest and greatest, but there is a reason that certain things like SQL have stood the test of time. I think the same could be said of the design world. There was a time not too long ago when designs actually felt polished and had real shapes, shadows, gradients. When you clicked on a button you actually knew you were clicking on a button. Then iOS 7 came along and everything became whi…
The test of time isn't always a good metric. html, css and javascript is a huge hack, yet it has withstood the test of time. SQL to me is a huge design flaw despite it's ubiquity. On the web bottlenecks happen at IO and algorithmic searches. Databases are essentially the bottlenecks of the web and how do we handle such bottlenecks? SQL; A high level almost functional language that is further away from the metal than…
Part of the reason SQL has stood the test of time is the very fact that it allows such a high level of abstraction. The big problem that it solved, compared to much of what existed at the time, was that it allowed you to decouple the physical format of the data from the applications that used it. That made it relatively easy to do two things that were previously very hard: Ask a database to answer questions it wasn't originally designed to answer, and modify a database's physical structure without having to change the code of every application that uses it.
A lot of "easier" technologies - including, arguably, ORM on top of relational databases - make things easier by sacrificing or compromising those very features that allow for such flexibility. Which speaks to the grandparent's point about technologies that make it easy to get started in the short term, at the cost of having major disadvantages in the long term.