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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

> for better or worse

For better. The only other success story just like it is JavaScript, which remains the one and only native browser programming language.

They work, they are good enough, everybody knows how to use them, gaining skills in those languages is valuable and timeless. No inane things like new languages du jour like golang that (fail at) reinventing the wheel appear every few years.

SQL remains beautifully boring & useful and is as close to program language perfection as we will ever get.

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> The only other success story just like it is JavaScript, which remains the one and only native browser programming language.

Javascript is a great example of exactly why this sort of thing is awful - Everyone has to use libraries like React or Vue just to make it usable, it's filled with weird backwards-compatibility junk, nobody can replace it because it is so entrenched, and attempts to make it better (typescript) end up with having to transpile backwards to javascript (rather than being able to just stand on their own).

The sooner we move to a world of web-assembly the better (but even web assembly frameworks at the moment end up having a substantial mix of javascript). We shouldn't have languages that are standard just because they are standard.

  > We shouldn't have languages that are standard just because they are standard.

This is extraordinarily naive. Standards are a far more important invention than Javascript, or even the transistor. A standard existing just to have a standard is far better than every browser implementing its own scripting language. We had that once, in fact my personal website still has the text "This website is not compatible with MS Internet Explorer. Please upgrade to Chrome, Firefox, or Opera for optimal experience." even though that hasn't been true for over a decade.

> This is extraordinarily naive.

I obviously disagree, and think that's a pretty dismissive comment.

> A standard existing just to have a standard is far better than every browser implementing its own scripting language.

We shouldn't be stuck with a language just because one person decided to invent a language in 7 days over 26 years ago for the internet at the time, and now we are stuck with that language forever with a VERY different internet. I would like to think in 10 years time we can move to a web where people have a choice of language.

And that doesn't mean what you imply - which is that every browser has it's own scripting language - because it's possible to architect an environment which allows for multiple programming languages in the browser (see bytecode, JVM, CLI, webassembly).

Is it really that naive to think that's a better way forwards?

I agree, better a mediocre standard than none. Out of interest, for Javascript there are many languages that transpile to javascript but support quite different approaches like functional programming, strongly typed, etc.

Is there something similar for SQL, where you allow an alternative syntax and maybe programming approach and then use SQL as connection to the DB ?

In java world the is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakarta_Persistence_Query_La...

Reading through these posts, I had exactly the same thought. Why not have a language that takes the problems with SQL and abstracts them to something that is more easily organized into functions, modules, and packages, corrects some of the semantic problems, integrates well with source control, testing, deployment pipelines, etc. DBT is solving this problem well for data warehouses, but I do not know if a similar tool application databases.

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