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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

> Why people in the web world don't use stored procedures and constraints is a mystery to me.

You can blame MySQL 4.1 for that :(

Most people who call themselves "web developers" haven't even heard of PostgreSQL, or even if they've heard of it, have no use for it because their usual clients are stuck with MySQL-only web hosts who have only just managed to upgrade to PHP 5.3.

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Most people, really?

Yes. HN is a bubble. There are ~700 PHP questions on SO a day and ~150 node.js. This is just one pair of numbers, you can mine your own whatever you like but you'll realize there are massive amounts of "web developers" with a ... low amount knowledge.

Thinking most web developers are still shipping PHP 5.3 apps on shared hosts is also a very outdated view.

Globally, it's not.

The latest version of WordPress is still compatible with PHP 5.2.4 and above, so anyone who builds a WordPress site is effectively shipping a PHP 5.2 app.

They do recommend php 5.4 though, and afaik they do try to push the community to upgrading.

It still means they can't depend on any feature introduced in PHP 5.3 or later. No closures, no namespaces.

Ditto for any theme or plugin that tries to be compatible with all versions of PHP that WordPress itself supports.

While I do agree with you, I want to make a distinction between shipping and building an application.

IMHO the term "developer" should not be applied to those that can just ship but rather those who can also build.

It doesn't matter if they are web, desktop, nor low-systems developer actually

Most auto-called web developers are just "web masters"

Now you're just redefining "developer".

No True Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge, and No True Developer just installs WordPress.

On the other hand, even Rails and Django encourage you to use the ORM whenever possible, so even a "developer" who builds apps on a modern framework is unlikely to be familiar with advanced SQL features.

For me, if you had to write even a single line of a Turing complete language to a file (so shell scripts yes, but one-time shell commands no) to install WP, that would count as development. Otherwise, it's just installation. Note: I have never installed WP.

Do people really consider ./configure && make && make install and its equivalents to be development now?

Not really. Most web developers are scare of using the cli.

Last time I checked the WP install process was something like...

1. download zip, extract

2. change your some config file

3. upload whole folder using FTP

4. go to /install or something, and from there..

5. click, click, click, edit text, click, click, click ...

That was only if the web developer was in hardcore mode, otherwise it was just _log into cpanel to use one-click installer_

I'm guessing you are not developer, because that kind of comment wouldn't come from someone who's thinking logically.

We don't need another flame war here.

And yes, most of the web is build on Wordpress/PHP - but you don't need to be a developer to install Wordpress.

What does logic have to do with it?

I'm just stating what I believe to be a fact: that the majority of web developers in this world never think of PostgreSQL as an option. I don't care whether that's a logical thing for them to think. It's just a fact, whether I like it or not.

If you think I'm wrong about the facts, please feel free to open a phone book in any part of the world other than the Bay Area, call up a decent sample of people who self-identify as web developers, and find out what percentage of them have ever heard of, let alone used, PostgreSQL.

So you start off ok here:

    I'm just stating what I believe to be a fact...

But then you move on to say:

    It's just a fact, whether I like it or not.

So which is it? Do you believe it to be a fact, or is it a fact? And if it is, where's your evidence?

(I happen to agree with your opinion, but the semantics here bug me.)

Sorry for the loose use of language. Everything that follows the colon after "I believe to be a fact", until the end of that paragraph, is the content of what I believe, including the statememt "It's just a fact." I believe that it's a fact.

Anecdotal evidence: I've interacted with dozens of other people who call themselves web developers over the years, and most of them (outside of Silicon Valley) have never used PostgreSQL, nor any advanced features of SQL in any other RDBMS.

Objective evidence: the large market share of WordPress, Drupal, and other content management systems that don't use any advanced database features; as well as the large market share of frameworks such as Rails, Django, and Laravel that encourage developers to stick with the ORM and not care about advanced database features.

Thanks for clarifying. It does seem all too common to pretend the database is a black box (via ORM) in the most popular frameworks.

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