On Tuesday 2006-06-13 09:26, David Fetter wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 09:18:17AM -0600, Scott Ribe wrote:
> > > What say we just stop right there and call Date's Relational Model
> > > what it is: a silly edifice built atop wrong premises.
> >
> > SQL was a quick and dirty hack (Systems R and R* needed some way to
> > interface with data) with multiple deficiencies recognized and
> > documented right within the very first paper by its own authors.
>
> Perfection isn't a human attribute. There isn't a whole lot of
> convincing evidence that it's a divine attribute. Did you have a
> point to make?
>
> > To hold it up as any kind of paradigm is really misinformed.
>
> SQL had something that relational algebra/relational calculus did not
> have, which is that somebody without a math degree can stare at it a
> short while and *do* something with it right away. That it also has
> other properties that are extremely useful and powerful (the ability
> to specify states of ignorance using NULL, do arithmetic, use
> aggregates, etc.) is what has made it such a smashing success.
>
> Now, there's another thing that makes it amazingly hard to displace:
> imagining what would be better *enough* to justify the many millions
> of people-years and even more billions of dollars needed to move away
> from it. Despite Date's many whines over the decades, his
> still-vaporware Relational Model doesn't even vaguely approximate that
> criterion.
>
> Cheers,
> D
COBOL and VisualBasic are better than Haskell by the same argument.
(SQL always reminds me a lot of COBOL.)