Ever since the paper on the Vietnam of Computer Science came out, I basically grew to wonder why SQL was the only language. Good? debatable. Composable? no. spreadsheet friendly, but not json friendly.
There are what, 1000 programming languages, but only one SQL? Why?
> I basically grew to wonder why SQL was the only language
You were well ahead of the pack simply by realizing that other options are possible. It is only within the last year or two that the HN crowd has finally come to accept that SQL and relational calculus are not the same thing. If you want a good laugh, check out the older posts on HN where the comments are adamant that there cannot be anything other than SQL for relational querying because it is some kind of fundamental mathematical truth.
> There are what, 1000 programming languages, but only one SQL? Why?
There are the family of languages that get lumped together under the ORM umbrella. They are quite popular – maybe even more popular than SQL. There are plenty of other languages that are less popular, but they are often impractical to use in any real-world scenario which maintains their unpopular status.
> but not json friendly.
Not standard SQL, but if we're counting extensions duality views are JSON friendly. The Oracle tax may be a tough pill to swallow, though.
I see the same thing happening in the hardware language space. There exists a large amount of gatekeeping by people who believe that Verilog/VHDL can ever only be the one true language. So research into alternative languages die. And interfaces are obfuscated behind the language.
There are other query languages out there, many of which fix the glaring issues with SQL. For example, Microsoft's Kusto Query Language (KQL) has the "FROM" clause at the beginning to enable tab-complete, you can chain multiple "WHERE" clauses without needing to use "AND", etc...
> but it enables armies of mediocre programmers to crunch out generic line of business applications very fast.
Or good programmers that see writing raw SQL as a premature optimization.
Someone on here once said that often companies end up reinventing their own ORM once the number of queries they have to maintain get up into the thousands. But they've usually made a really shitty ORM by that point in time.
If I were a former lawyer, I wouldn't give any advice other than general knowledge.
e.g.
"Could you sue on behalf of the shareholders of your CEO's embezzlement and win? Maybe? Should you? I don't know, I'm not your attorney, and I haven't studied any of your claims."
Our intention is not to recover the 13 weeks of pay, but we would rather let them keep it, and remove them from the company being that's the "pay out" they get for their shares.
Although, we are trying to understand if this could be considered as fraud so we can remove them with a legally solid reason, and confiscate their shares.
Sounds more like embezzlement than fraud, but a key question will be what powers the CEO that don't require shareholder votes. For example, if an employee came to him and asked for 2 weeks of pay advance due to some emergency, could he grant it unilaterally? Obviously it's different since there's a conflict of interest when he's doing it for himself, but it's still a relevant data point. Check your bylaws to see if this sort of thing is spelled out.
My biggest complaint of modern keyboards is pinky overloading off the home row, particularly on the right hand side of the keyboard.
My second biggest complaint is that CTRL and ALT keys are the second most important after the SHIFT. But on the laptop I'm typing on, they're super small and placed under the hands, and there's a FN and a WINDOWS button between them on the left hand side, making it hard to hit unless you pull your hand off the keyboard so you can see.
The last complaint is doing super spock pinches for weird macros. CRTL-ALT-SHIFT-Z. The last could be fixed by composing, and not requiring the three keys be pressed down together. The SHIFT letter combinations came from the old typewriters where SHIFT key raised the letters so the upper case keys could be struck. And we've stuck with that for better or worse.
Except ORMs are just worse? Unless you mean they are the symptom of longing for other languages where there are none.
I would also love to see a new language for writing declarative queries. I also feel people don't like sql not for the language itself, but the lack of tooling.
> One might say that if SQL was so great there would be no ORMs
It's not like the ORMs exist without SQL. Their primary purpose is to provide a consistent interface between different flavors of SQL so the application developer doesn't need to care what database they're using.
For example, delimiting object names in Mysql uses ` and in Postgres uses ". The ORM will ostensibly have different adapters which take care of these differences without changing the application code.
It lessens the pain, still. It's rare that you'd use common ORM methods and run into something that's supported for one RDBMS and not another. Doing stuff that's less common and, of course, writing raw SQL will still be pain points but they'll be fewer than if one was doing everything in raw SQL.
We have also cloned Unix entirely since 1980, and extended and improved it. Yet, we are booting the systems using shell scripts where an unquoted variable stops the show. Why is that?
Why is there still a C:\ drive in personal computers, and an invisible device called PRN in every directory?
Yes, and middle men get squeezed. Their customers want to pay less over time, and their suppliers want them to pay more.
It's one thing if you're taking raw materials and building something of value and reselling it. But I see this turning into record labels creating their own streaming services, much like Peacock+/Apple+/Universal+/etc.
It's not hard to imagine a world where you have to pay $100/year to stream Pink Floyd from the Warner Music catalog.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/war-marijuana-blac....
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