this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
500 points (98.1% liked)
Programmer Humor
26237 readers
2108 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ah, the SQLite approach!
They finally added strict tables which avoids most (all?) of those shenanigans.
I never really minded the shenanigans, after reading the docs once it all mostly made sense
I don't really mind them either, it's just exciting that there is finally a way to make it actually act type safe.
Me: Puts a boolean into sqlite
Me: Asks for that boolean
SQLite: "Here's that int you asked for"
It is also the bash approach, isn't it?!
Also, Tcl (a cute little scripting language from the 90s, best known for giving the world the Tk UI toolkit; it was somewhat Lispy, only under the hood, worked like sh, where everything was a string).
more directly, sqlite was originally for tcl which is why they share the semantics.
also I'd argue that sqlite is a bigger contribution than tk, but I suppose in a more roundabout way
Does GNU make count? It's crazy what you can do with the macro expressions, basically a Functional language using only string types. There's even a math "library" that will do arithmetic with numbers in strings.
You can calculate n and n?
28
That's easy
God, I'm so over SQL.
It's great, but it is so old and shows it. Feels like 99% of my SQL queries are just cheese.
Works though, and quick.
SQL is the only bedrock in my entire career. Its the one thing that has stayed relevant.
SQL is great but when you start having issues processing what is actually going on, its fine to pull out what you need and throw another language on top (python, C#, etc...etc...). Getting it to work slow is one step in making it fast again.
Yeah, this is what I end up doing. SQL does all the heavy lifting, and python or M usually doing the rest. Though M can be soooo slow.
Yeah it's curious that it hasn't really undergone some major changes or had some major challengers (except NoSQL I guess).
sql as the language executed by the db hasn't changed notably, but I do think there's been significant developments in ORMs. for a lot of developmers sql is now just an intermediate target
Cool concept, didn't know about it will check out!
Its been a while but yeah NoSQL was the closest.
I remember a good 4-5 years where developers all around me were using couchdb, mongodb, and a host of others. mostly json in <-> json out kind of systems. And VERY hard to maintain after the initial TODO. I remember so much debugging and finding out old records didnt have a way to deal with changes in the "tables" or equivalents. It was maddening.
Dont get me wrong, it did create some really awesome specialty tools but you cant really get around ACID compliance when dealing with databases.
I think SQL has some awesome properties that keep it going:
Yeah 100% with you, had this mongo database where the first entry was like a description, the nr 2 and on the actual data. I mean if there were a description... Sometes 2 descriptions...
Why oh why.
And for sure SQL is kind of the cement of DB today, don't get me wrong, I like that what I learned yesterday actually still works, I'm just pondering the fact that it is so.
Maybe SQL isn't the hip language so people doesn't try to reinvent it all the time 😁
It has though
Window functions were an addition, but more recently struct, json, and array fields with native support. Pipe syntax is getting multiple implementations.
Match recognize is a whole new standard abstraction of window functions.
Union by name is being added (fuck union by position).
Isn't this more like evolution or even just optimisation? I mean it doesn't seem like a fundamental shift (can be wrong, just checked it out quickly).
Sure, i think its just sql has not had any breaking version changes in like… ever?
Yeah, that's really one in a kind for such an important feature.