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Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, there is a middle ground. Elixir's Ecto does this well.

Ecto is by far the closest thing to a perfect pattern for abstracting over sql that I've ever seen. I WISH other languages would create similar libraries. Its the biggest thing keeping me coming back to elixir for any kind of database project. it just makes sql so ergonomic.

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As someone who works with an 8 year old 500k LOC elixir codebase with millions of users, I hate Ecto so much. The thing I hate most is that there are 2 different syntaxes.

But a close second is that it encourages composition in situations where duplication is the right choice. Having your sql query spread across 7 files makes tracking down bugs and performance issues (and fixing them) incredibly difficult.

I mean FWIW Scala has Slick (but then you're dealing with the rest of Scala ecosystem...) and there's Linq2Db on .NET side. Having dealt with all 3 on some level (Slick the least) I would say they are fairly similar in intent (i.e. differences are primarily due to language idioms.)

I'm not sure Slick is still maintained. Recently I depended on https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/scalasql#simpletable-variant-... for small CRUD stuff and liked it quite a bit. These days there's a whole boulevard through the Scala ecosystem that doesn't involve typelevel pedantry and obscure DSLs just for the love of hieroglyphics.

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