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Comment by yowzadave | Hacker News Reader

I agree that ORMs are bad, but disagree in that I think that SQL is also bad--it has this bizarre natural-ish language syntax that is inconsistent and often difficult to reason about, with a huge number of keywords (including many that are noise-only). I would welcome a simple, modern alternative to SQL. I think the fact that people keep building and using ORMs is evidence that SQL is difficult to use.

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This post about "PRQL" got a ton of upvotes when it was posted on HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060784

In general, one of the thing I hate most about SQL is "the order of clauses is wrong" (should really start with the FROM clause and end with SELECT, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21150606), and PRQL fixes that.

And if that's the biggest perceived problem with SQL, then SQL isn't going anywhere.

It can't just be a little better than SQL, especially in terms of syntactic aesthetics; it has to be substantially and provably better than SQL to the point where companies are willing to pay for retraining, folks are willing to buy books and classes about it, and database engine developers have to consider it worthwhile to implement.

I don't see PRQL coming close to reaching that bar.

It's not a problem with SQL. For example, in ClickHouse, you can write FROM table SELECT ... But this is not a big deal.

But at that point, it’s no longer SQL, it’s something better. That seems like a very nice point in favor of Clickhouse! But then again, Clickhouse is not a RDBMS, right?

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