← Back to context

Comment by marcus_holmes

7 years ago

really? the article has a handful of strange edge cases that you'll almost never smack into in practice, and that's cause to say the language is crap?

Given the vast usage of SQL and its overwhelming popularity, if there were real problems with the language then there would be a lot more noise about them. But most people seem to be happy with it.

If it's not broken, let's not fix it, eh?

18 comments

marcus_holmes

Reply
setr  7 years ago

The only edge cases I could find in the article were the discussion of nulls... which aren’t so much an edge case as they are just an ever-present problem that no one really notices until it hurts (its not at all difficult to write a broken-on-null query). Is there something else you’re referring to? Afaict, everything else was just trivially observable aspects of the language

>Given the vast usage of SQL and its overwhelming popularity, if there were real problems with the language then there would be a lot more noise about them. But most people seem to be happy with it.

In what universe does popularity imply quality? Certainly not the one I’m in — Avengers endgame is apparently #2 gross worldwide ever :-)

  • orange8  7 years ago

    I think the point he is making is that why hasn't anything better come up to better represent the relational model in over 40 years?

    • setr  7 years ago

      There are other models as well eg datalog, but popularity is a factor of many things — a major factor with databases is that historically the engine is far more important than the language; you would expect users to choose an engine, and whatever language came with it. Which implies that the decision is on the producer side, not the consumers.

      Which finally implies that usage popularity is not adequately explained by user preference, because you wouldn’t expect user language preference to have significant impact on the decision making process.

      But regardless, are you also going to claim that C, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc were optimal in their respective fields, during their respective eras, because they held total market domination? Incumbency is one hell if a drug..

      Bandwaggoning and deffering to the status quo is not argument for quality; there are too many factors involved beyond quality itself. Fixable flaws in the language have been pointed out and not been addressed in this conversation chain. Alternatives languages exist, both academically and practically; they don’t come alone. Its not a competition in a void, the ecosystem has to move together. This occurs in every aspect of tech (did you ever wonder if there could be an OS other than unix and window styles?).

      Asking why SQL was never beaten out in popularity is a hugely different question from whether there can be a better language than SQL, with largely unrelated amswers(Oracle/IBM were hardly fair players in anything they did)

      7 replies →

rbanffy  7 years ago

There are real problems with COBOL and, yet, it's used in the most critical parts of our societal infrastructure. People just learned to live with the problems and are by now completely oblivious to them.