Now all I read about is how Postgres is awesome, as if it's this great new thing. I guess that makes sense, as the new generation of engineers is rediscovering stable, reliable, lean technologies after a decade of excesses with "exotic" tech.
For grey beards, it's all very odd. Like, "where have you all been?"
Now, my opinion of Martin in general is not especially high and he's a bit of a controversial figure, but it wasn't just the kids. And Martin is also all about reliable software, so that makes it even more surprising.
It's the same reason he's so pro Trump I think.
> Doors and wheels fall off airplanes. Hundreds of illegal immigrants assault and overrun border guards in Texas. We can’t even muster support for our allies in the security council. But at least our pronouns are in order.
https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/177262869295654553...
You really need to be a special sort of individual to go from a collapsed bridge to ranting about pronouns with no prompting or any prior mention of that. What a complete spanner.
Pure evil, as Trump would call it.
Or he's a hyper-politicized idiot completely consumed and obsessed by some topics and needs to talk about them all the fucking time at the drop of a hat, whether appropriate or not.
It has nothing to do with "sides"; it has to do with the forceful injection of completely unrelated matters.
Agree. Out of control neo-feudal lords taking up all the slack out of every system they can get their tendrils into in the name of efficiency, thus endangering us all in order to extract as much profit as possible out of our entire economic system.
The "other side"'s solution tends to be to further deregulate industry and the economy, and to empower and lower the tax burden of these neo-feudal lords, all while pointing at gays, trans-folk, and immigrants as if they are the reason people can't afford rent and bridges are falling down.
Just one problem, huh?
This illustrates what I meant about black and white thinking.
This is not black and white reasoning. Each problem can be on a continuous plane, from "slightly bothersome" to "there is an absolutely horrible evil lurking here".
Not an actual quote but a factual statement
To me the difference was in recognizing that the architecture advice is implicit - its not actually written down in the code, rather the code exemplifies it - and the business domain is explicitly modeled. When developers name everything "use case" and "interactor" and go crazy with packages and folder structures with architectural names it's a recipe for terribleness.
https://twitter.com/unclebobmartin/status/107212575854868889...
Which means his opinions are more often than not uninformed opinions and should be taken with a grain of salt.
You don't need a college education to read research articles, books and journals. But you certainly need an open mind and some discipline to not try to reinvent the wheel all the time. You need to learn about the state of the art in your field.
Some ideas and algorithms are proven and battle tested, and people should learn about them, before trying to create something new and claim it is much better than the old thing. This is very noticeable in some fields like cryptography.
His modus operandi certainly seems to be on the other extreme, everything old is bad and the new thing around the corner is going to change everything. Which causes a lot of people who believe him to collectively waste millions of hours of their time.
About your comments on the degree... it really depends on how you got it. For most people, I would agree with you. A small group of people in academia are insanely smart and are focused on research.
I love Postgres and it's been my go-to default since 2014 and you can pry it from my cold dead hands, but it's more contemporary with Perl 6 than Perl 5 if we're talking grey beards.
I do not actually use any of the others you listed (well, occasionally bitmap index scans, but it's not a killer). The main difference between 8.x and 15.x for me is the small stream of optimizer features and tweaks (e.g. at some point, it started being able to reorder outer joins).
Extensions in Postgres 8 (and earlier) were also half-baked compared to 9.1 (2011), which added CREATE EXTENSION and other quality-of-life improvements including standardization.
The latest complete implementations are what most people have in mind when talking about them.
Would I pick Postgres 15 over Postgres 8? Yes, any day of the week. But I would also readily pick Postgres 8 over most of today's databases (including e.g. the latest MySQL and MongoDB versions), for most projects, if that was the choice I had.
MySQL foot guns were mostly under control by 2010, and it was operationally efficient to manage a cluster of MySQL servers in diverse configurations with mostly-known boundaries to what could go wrong.
The Postgres foundations are the same today, but what you can build on top is very different today than it was pre-9.x.
This assumes you need replication, though. You can get pretty far without it, especially given how wide hardware you can get now.
> MySQL foot guns were mostly under control by 2010
Eh. :-) I think you would have to specify which footguns in particular.
Also replication can be good for other operational reasons, such as zero downtime major version upgrades. Again depends on the business need/expectations.
Risks to the business are more important to me than my enthusiasm for a technology or product.
Somehow the entire Mongo DB era passed me through and I never used it once. I used to use MySQL in the 2000s, and switched to PostgreSQL in the 2010s.
They had an ORM which made everything much slower, and the most common operation they did was to add items into lists, which causes the whole document to be resized and requires it to be moved.
It could have been done with 1 sql server, but we needed 4 really heavy mongodb servers instead. And of course our code was buggy so the schema was all over the place.
To be frank, PostgreSQL has evolved a lot since the late nineties. There was a time where people preferred MySQL over it at it seemed to work faster, certain things were easier and so on.
The MySQL performance advantages were large, with the small caveat that it was fast as long as you were using MyISAM, which achieved its speed by throwing away many safety features, like working transactions and foreign key constraints. Unsurprisingly, when eventually it got an engine that didn't throw caution to the wind, the performance advantage went away.
I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s showing people whose that many of the issues they were facing with their e-commerce websites were ultimately down to the MySQL engine they had picked. But it's faster! Yes it is, but now your application code has to deal with all the things the engine has now offloaded to your application code.
It's not that Postgres' changes were key to increasing market share, but that as MySQL matured, it had no options but to lose its 'advantages'.
I say “was”. I hear it’s vastly better now.
Without these windowless years, PostgreSQL would be the most used RDBMS right now.