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Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

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Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#151

Post by cindyllm »

thewebguyd wrote: post #150
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL ah, this is an Ai article

Can we stop calling specific literary devices as automatically AI? Yes, LLMs overuse that pattern. But it's a valid rhetorical device used for many , many years by human authors. Quite often too, especially in philosophical writing, and fantasy novels. I'll give you that it wasn't often used in blogs or tech articles, but LLMs have been around long enough to have influenced human writing in other domains without the…

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Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#152

Post by JALTU »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #124
EvanAnderson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thousand times this. I've resolved performance issues in so many stored procedures written by programmers who don't grasp set theory and reach for the CURSOR early and often. The quote that comes to mind: "His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking."

I guess I think in 2.5D because I’ll often sketch an imperative, dumb query and then refine it once I know I’ve got the data I need. But I have a hard time starting with elegance. I use a baseball bat to shape the garbage can into the desired form

You'd have a future in modern sculpture. ;-) Okay, sorry sculptors! I like the brute force of the bat/garbage symbolism that seems so fitting in this day and age.

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#153

Post by layer8 »

flossly wrote: post #54
aledevv wrote: post #30

> If you are a junior developer, “learn SQL properly” is the most valuable 40 hours you can spend. Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans. That investment pays you back at every job, in every stack, for decades This is the power of low-level reasoning. Today, even for a junior developers, even if they have AI that solves syntax problems, SQL teaches you to reason and…

I find SQL a very thick "wrapper masking low-level logic". Think of the query planning, the index-maintaining, the upholding of guarantees, the writing-to-disk and caching that you are all not doing by using a RDBMS! I'd say SQL is a very high level language. "SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically" -- I kind of agree here. It teaches relational data mgmt. I think it is better to attack most softwa…

“Fundamental” rather than “low-level”. Which also matches the article picture.

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#154

Post by layer8 »

trgn wrote: post #141
teleforce wrote: post #2

>The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion As a modern array language D4M is the natural successor for SQL [1]. D4M is based on mathematics like SQL, specifically associative array algebra but not relational unlike SQL. It's more generic since can it caters to most modern data abstractions including spreadsheets, database tables, matrices, and graphs [2]. You can achieve 100M database inserts pe…

i'm probably pretty dumb but i don't really get what's so mathematical about sql.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_algebra

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#155

Post by pdevr »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #123
aledevv wrote: post #30

> If you are a junior developer, “learn SQL properly” is the most valuable 40 hours you can spend. Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans. That investment pays you back at every job, in every stack, for decades This is the power of low-level reasoning. Today, even for a junior developers, even if they have AI that solves syntax problems, SQL teaches you to reason and…

> Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL ah, this is an Ai article

Darn. I write exactly like this. You need to consider that people write in different ways, and the LLM is choosing from among the different styles.

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#156

Post by adzm »

NoSalt wrote: post #146

> "JavaScript and its ecosystem is an environment where browser wars, framework trends, and open-source maintainer preferences reshaped every few years." In general, I hate frameworks, and not just JavaScript frameworks. Firstly, for the reasons she describes; they do change quite frequently and break stuff. Secondly, I don't see it saving any more time than using several nice libraries. Not only do you have to learn…

This is why I like things like React and Astro, for the most part it is just JavaScript in the end. Other than JSX which is already familiar from using HTML and has applications beyond React

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#157

Post by flossly »

layer8 wrote: post #153
flossly wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find SQL a very thick "wrapper masking low-level logic". Think of the query planning, the index-maintaining, the upholding of guarantees, the writing-to-disk and caching that you are all not doing by using a RDBMS! I'd say SQL is a very high level language. "SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically" -- I kind of agree here. It teaches relational data mgmt. I think it is better to attack most softwa…

“Fundamental” rather than “low-level”. Which also matches the article picture.

I was reacting to the parent post. And F and LL are very different. I'd say F is a more subjective metric.

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#158

Post by adzm »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #79
wodenokoto wrote: post #47

I think the pretext of this articles is ridiculous. Yes, SQL is based around relational algebra, but all programming languages are built on a theoretical foundation. And SQL is very much a "fad" language - it just somehow managed to stick around. The goal was not some sort of mathematical purity, but rather to built a natural language data interface (sounds like something currently very hyped?) and it failed spectacu…

> And SQL is very much a "fad" language - it just somehow managed to stick around. Probably because - despite it not being perfect - the only people who have been able to do it better are very slight variations of it like LINQ and Logica and GoogleSQL etc.

KQL is a great language for quickly analyzing data, too. I've grown to love it.

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#159

Post by trumpdong »

pdevr wrote: post #155
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL ah, this is an Ai article

Darn. I write exactly like this. You need to consider that people write in different ways, and the LLM is choosing from among the different styles.

I heard it mostly writes in a style associated with low-class people from Kenya.

Re: Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years

#160

Post by flossly »

graemep wrote: post #109
flossly wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find SQL a very thick "wrapper masking low-level logic". Think of the query planning, the index-maintaining, the upholding of guarantees, the writing-to-disk and caching that you are all not doing by using a RDBMS! I'd say SQL is a very high level language. "SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically" -- I kind of agree here. It teaches relational data mgmt. I think it is better to attack most softwa…

Yes, i think the right wording is something like "the power of understanding the concepts" or "having the right mental model" rather than "low level".

And this I think is best not done in SQL/ the relational-data paradigm. It's better to understand the problem in terms that do not tie you in to a specific technology. And once you have a clear picture of what need to be built, then choose persistence tech; if that happens to be SQL, you can then translate your solution to SQL.

In my experience, SQL sorely misses sum-types. So I need to find a way to serialize the sum-types of my domain model to SQL.

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