Tangential question: I'm curious how many people (here on HN, or in general) learned SQL before they learned more traditional programming (e.g. Python, Java, C)? I learned traditional programming (through college) and only stumbled upon SQL years later (someone left a "How to use Microsft Access" book around at work).

I absolutely love SQL, and am in the middle of writing a book on how to use just SQLite for large, complicated data work. My target audience is programmers, but also non-programmers, because I think SQL is vastly easier to learn than something like Python. The tradeoff of course is that SQL is much more limited a framework, but it's more than enough to do data work (all the stuff that isn't visualization or complex stats).

When I lived around Palo Alto, I met a few recent grads who didn't study STEM in college, but ended up working for tech firms in content and analytics roles. They'd know Excel and Tableau, but through co-workers, would pick up SQL to make their data work easier. But they hadn't yet had learned general programming, or tried Python/Javascript.

But I can't imagine many other professional or academic career paths in which someone who ends up learning and using both Python and SQL started out with SQL, then learned Python (i.e. general programming). Would would they have done with SQL in school, or as a hobby?