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I Don't Want to Teach My Garbage DSL, Either

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Re: I Don't Want to Teach My Garbage DSL, Either

#51
post #4

If you’re developing a DSL which is just a query language, you are reinventing the wheel, and you should ask yourself if any benefit of your language over SQL is worth the effort of all your users to learn your new query language. It may be worth it of your data can not be usefully be modeled by tables; e.g. document query languages like XQuery and even simple XPath are useful and can not be easily replaced with SQL.

Well are there any data on how much more fuzz there is to learn a domain specific language compared to a domain specific library?

Arduino "whatever it is called but really c++"-language or Warcraft 3 scenario language are kinda nice for what they are.

Re: I Don't Want to Teach My Garbage DSL, Either

#52
post #4

If you’re developing a DSL which is just a query language, you are reinventing the wheel, and you should ask yourself if any benefit of your language over SQL is worth the effort of all your users to learn your new query language. It may be worth it of your data can not be usefully be modeled by tables; e.g. document query languages like XQuery and even simple XPath are useful and can not be easily replaced with SQL.

Well are there any data on how much more fuzz there is to learn a domain specific language compared to a domain specific library? Arduino "whatever it is called but really c++"-language or Warcraft 3 scenario language are kinda nice for what they are.

Neither of those are query languages.

Re: I Don't Want to Teach My Garbage DSL, Either

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's for querying records from a database. The application of the language does not make the language itself great. As we have seen with DSLs that often come bundled with ORMs, there are other languages to query databases with (even if they ultimately compile to SQL), and I would argue that some of them do a lot better job than SQL does for providing a comfortable and cohesive environment for developers to write qu…

Working with relational databases might be difficult for those not acquainted with them. However, I think the SQL language as an interface primarily for relation databases is a great language. I think, invariably when you use ORM, you end up having query-specific object structures. For example [1]. You also might be passed objects with deferred fields [2]. This will be completely opaque to someone consuming the resul…

> However, I think the SQL language as an interface primarily for relation databases is a great language.

Which language(s) are you using as a point of comparison and why is SQL better than those other languages? SQL is no doubt better than nothing, but that is not in the spirit of our discussion.

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