This editorial was originally published on Mar 21, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.
I ran across this post ranting about T-SQL. It's got going pretty quickly with some less that professional responses. It's cleaned itself up a bit, but it got me thinking for this Friday.
My first programming was done in BASIC. From there I played with a little assembler before going on to Pascal and C in high school. The came LISP, APL, Fortran, more assembler, C++, and a little ADA in college. My professional career had me programming in Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, FoxPro, C, VB, and finally SQL with minor dabbling in HTML, XML, ASP, and some .NET.
I think I've had a decent amount of programming experience in my life. In that time, I've found that most programming languages to work fine, and while I've enjoyed some more than others, I haven't thought that any "sucked." I wouldn't want to write most modern apps in APL, but I don't much think there's any thing wrong with picking VB.NET v Java v C#. So for this Friday's poll:
Is T-SQL really a strange paradigm?
Or SQL in general? Is it really messed up? Would the structures used by LINQ make more sense to anyone? Hardcore developers seem to like a different structure, but is it because it seems more natural to them? Or is SQL really such a strange beast.
Many people seem to have trouble with SQL. Just read the forums here at SQLServerCentral to see all the issues that come when people try to query the database. But is it just hard to learn or is there a better way to build a query language?
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