Re: Fabian Pascal and RDBMS deficiencies in fully implementing

From: "Florian G(dot) Pflug" <fgp(at)phlo(dot)org>
To: tshipley(at)deru(dot)com
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Fabian Pascal and RDBMS deficiencies in fully implementing
Date: 2006-06-17 00:24:12
Message-ID: 44934BAC.2090303@phlo.org
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Trent Shipley wrote:
> On Tuesday 2006-06-13 09:26, David Fetter wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 09:18:17AM -0600, Scott Ribe wrote:
>>> 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.

> COBOL and VisualBasic are better than Haskell by the same argument.
Well, VisualBasic really sucks IMHO, but if I had to choose between
taking over a 100.000-line VB Project, or a 10.000 line Haskhell
Project, I'm not sure if I wouldn't choose the VB one.

Haskhell has very nice properties, but there are haskhell onelines
which I can stare at for hours, and am still not exactly sure what they
do ;-)

I normally prefer languages with a terse syntax, but haskhell is
sometimes too much even for me ;-)

greetings, Florian Pflug

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