Comment by NortySpock
2 years ago
Cut my teeth writing CCL for several years at Cerner. It has its rough points, but I learned a lot of valuable SQL optimization experience.
Looking back I can see why post-processing SQL query results using a procedural section at least gives you an escape hatch to do business reports or other iterative tasks.
I don't miss it, but I can see why CCL was designed and written at the time.
Most of why I disliked working with CCL as a client developer was because it was a pretty poor developer experience. The tooling was cumbersome, the feedback loop was long, no easy way to do source control (I think they were working on improving that aspect), and of course the limited user base comes with its difficulties. Not that any of this is particularly surprising for a homegrown programming environment.
Hey, what if they wanted to use another database than Oracle and not have to rewrite all the SQL.