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Comment by andr | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that finds certain aspects of NoSQL databases easier to use than SQL? Despite having used different SQL ORMs and writing two on my own, I'm a big fan of MongoDB. It's fun using it for small projects, too, even if I know scalability and speed won't be an issue.

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OK - I have to bite. Who writes 2 ORMs? What was wrong with the first one?

Maybe the work was done at two different employers.

I somehow doubt an employer knowingly paid for an engineer to spend time writing an ORM.

On the contrary, both were done with the employers' knowledge. The first ORM was very... magic-heavy, relying on monkey patching classes and stuff like that. Therefore, it was a pain to debug. The second one I wrote later using code generation. Much simpler, yet just as flexible.

You were surprised? In my experience most hackers love redoing the last project, only better. There's all the joy of victory over your past mistakes, and less of the pain of struggling with an unfamiliar problem.

They love it so much they usually have to be counseled out of doing it when it isn't a good idea for strategic or other reasons.

This is usually called the "second system effect", especially when the second is overambitious and never gets finished.

That made me think of TextMate 2.

I agree with you. I mostly use MongoDB with Ruby and mongo_record. I find this combination so easy to use that I don't have to think about it (like driving a car). I always keep MongoDB running as a service on my laptops and it is installed but not always running on my servers. BTW, if you use Ruby, have you noticed how much faster mongo_record accesses MongoDB using Ruby 1.9.1 instead of 1.8.x? (Faster than I expected from the usual 1.9 speedup.)

Your comment just made me realize SQL is the new assembly.

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