Comment by fifilura
3 months ago
I second all of that!
I wish more people would see the beauty. After a session of SQL, when I take a step back and think.
"Hold on. What I have been doing lately is just pure logic. No library dependency resolution, no concurrency problems (even though massive concurrency is certainly under the hood). No mutability issues. Just logic."
SQL obviously has its warts, some of them serious, like testability. But at the end of the day, I wish all programming was like that. Let the computer decide how to do stuff under the hood. And let the human focus on the logic.
I have somewhat half-assed tried to read up on Prolog for trying to take it to the next level, but failed sofar unfortunately. (It was also a goal to try to unlearn some SQL to avoid getting stuck in some local optimum). Maybe somewhere between SQL and Prolog is the future of programming.
> Maybe somewhere between SQL and Prolog is the future of programming.
Must be Datalog then ;)
Prolog is very powerful, if you see what professionals can do with it it's eye opening. Unfortunately, it takes a complete relearning of programming to achieve that proficiency level. And after you reach it, you probably cannot use it in your day job...
My problem with Prolog is every time I want to start using it I feel like I'm populating a database then doing queries on it. So it feels like SQL with another syntax and less power.
I'm sure I'm wrong and missing something but that's where I stop.
> I feel like I'm populating a database then doing queries on it. So it feels like SQL
I'm not sure what database technology/data storage that doesn't involve doing those two things to get started.
I haven't done any Prolog, but Datalog which is similar and focused on querying data, and the benefits of Datalog for me is that you can write complex/medium-complex queries a lot easier than in SQL, at least for me. Simpler queries are just less characters, but pretty much the same beyond that.
Probably helps that the Clojure ecosystem embraced Datalog so it mostly feels like writing Clojure code although it's really Datalog. You don't get that same feeling regardless of what SQL library/DSL you use.
Prolog is in fact a kind of database. However it is untrue that it has less power than SQL, just the opposite. Probably it feels harder to use because you're already so used to how SQL works.
> Maybe somewhere between SQL and Prolog is the future of programming.
it was, it most probably is