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Comment by lyu07282 | Hacker News Reader

perhaps its because ORMs are considered bad by some people, so to them writing these GET API endpoints is very tiresome, having to always construct these complex filter queries by hand. From that vantage point it would make sense to move toward runtime database introspection, but then they realize that the API data model is different from the data layer so they introduce table views, and then they realize their permission system doesn't quite fit into this so they introduce row-level security, ...

I don't know why they want to write SQL so much, its a 50 year old language, it sucks ass :P

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It's like there's a massive army of developers solely focused on writing GET APIs even though we have the tools to completely automate this and more but they always find excuses to not use these tools - this thread is full of them. I don't get it, what they're really doing is just translating a to b over and over again. "Same but different". That's really the last thing I want to spend my time on.

> even though we have the tools to completely automate this

PostgREST is literally a tool to automate this.

Well yes but people seem very keen on not using it (or another tool that does the same or similar).

People are free not to use it, of course, but when they offer their reasoning I just don't think it holds up. For example, sometimes they say, "PostgREST doesn't save much because writing REST services is so trivial that it can even be automated." Again, my response to this is: if it's trivial, then why pay an expensive developer to do it? If it can be automated, then why do it it at all? If it can be automated, then automate it. Which...is precisely what PostgREST does.

The point I made at the beginning of this thread is that it’s a long term high cost and a potential dead end, that really didn’t save you much time. If you are in early stage and just need to move fast and find your product fit it could make sense. But again the problem it solves isn’t hard, and quickly makes things harder than they need to be.

Yes, that's what I understood your belief to be, right from the beginning of this thread. I just haven't encountered any reason anywhere among these comments to persuade me to share your belief.

PostgREST is not an ORM. I suspect you know that, but others might be confused so I wanted to point this out.

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