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Comment by benmccann | Hacker News Reader

PL/SQL is an awful language to work with. What's up with having to declare variables before using them? Does it not even have multi-pass compilation?! And it works only with Oracle, which causes lock-in I'd rather avoid.

I'd rather create a service layer on top of my DB and access it through that. Then I have more control over logging, managing access, pubsub, etc.

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It makes me laugh, people who won't write a single keyword to specify the type of a variable, but will write a hundred lines of unit tests to make sure it's always what you want.

Dude. Stop it. He didn't mention unit tests. If you have a point, stop making stuff up about the posters you're responding to.

Oh I'm sorry, didn't know we were playing word games. The above poster complained about having to declare the types of his variables as if that was a bad thing. I simply pointed why it was in fact a good thing - you don't now need to do tests to ensure that your function that expects an INT always gets an INT, the type system takes care of it for you.

Discussions at this level presuppose a certain amount of background knowledge. Do try to keep up.

You mean as opposed to creating tests for storage failures when my strongly typed DB complains?

things need to be tested, strongly typed DB or not.

Please quit it with the Rude manner. It's against HN guidelines and makes your arguments weaker to boot. Or leave and go somewhere else.

Declaring variables isn't hard. However, in Postgresql one can use many languages to write stored procs. I prefer plpgsl but TCL, Python and Perl are also available in the stock distribution.

"isn't hard"? Yeah, writing it in Algol isn't "hard" either, but why? If something's harder to use and less performant, why would it even be on my list of things to maybe consider?

C coders manage easily enough.

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