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Why I’m Grateful for Having Learned Structured Query Language, and Why You Should Learn It Too
There is a programming language called Structured Query Language. I happened to learn it back in the early 1990s because of work.
(It just occurred to me that the only non-menial paid work I found after being made redundant, as the Brits call it, was a short contract job as an SQL programmer! I wasn’t really a programmer, to be honest, but it was the only skill I had acquired in 30-plus years at IBM that anyone outside that company could recognize.)
Anyway, it is not because I needed it for programming that made it so valuable to me.
It’s the fact that it allows humans to organize and communicate their thoughts.
Think and communicate about what? Anything they can imagine. About any world, or any part of that world–the real world as it is, a real world as it is hypothesized, and the unreal world of pure logic and math.
Communicate what about that world? Communicate anything about it.
Communicate concisely, completely, with perfect precision, and with perfect mutual understanding.
How concisely?
In one sentence. Any question, now matter how complex, no matter how many convoluted conditions and exceptions and interconnections, can be expressed in one sentence.
How hard is the language to learn? To ask most common questions, it has one command (“select (this) from (that) where (the other).
I think everyone should become proficient at it before graduating from high school.
In addition to having great intellectual value, it would be of great practical value every day to ordinary people, because they are mostly all using the computer all the time to get information. Even to use Ricochet.
Why is it not being used by everybody every day?
That is a whole ‘nother question.
Published in General
But a driver might be better, since you have a long way to go. 😜
The unreal world of pure logic and math?
You’re probably right. But would a decent logic curriculum not accomplish the same goals?
Different goals, really. Understanding data and understanding that data about a thing is not the thing is a different tool and focus. Logic is related. It is a different set of rules for life that everyone needs.
TL;DR:
Your mom uses SQL
I’m lost. What goal of learning SQL are we talking about here? What do you think is the goal of studying logic?
SQL is not robust enough to be a programming language, therefore plSQL (procedural SQL) was invented; and it’s a mess.
To be sure, I didn’t ever think you were anything but another member.
I take that knowledge of yours as a given.
The point of my article is that learning SQL was very valuable to me, and might be to others…even to all high school kids. As I mentioned in the OP, it isn’t my purpose to answer the question ‘then why don’t ordinary computer users not just learn it, but use it every day when they use the computer?’
That is a very complicated question. That is why I explicitly excluded it from the Conversation.
You are right that answering that complicated side question would require a lot of experience and knowledge in dealing with data, copyright law, security, and corporate governance and other equally important knowledge of interest to the seller. And also the piece of experience and knowledge of interest to the buyer, which you left out: knowledge of customer requirements: making it easier, faster, more reliable, and cheaper to (a) save and to (b) get, the information they need, when they need it, and in the form they need it.
With putter, I did always have a long way to go. Get me the big gun out of the bag, even longer. Especially when the leaves had fallen in the woods, or the snow.
There are fewer expletives to learn in SQL.
True.
Note: you are going beyond the scope of the OP, which is about SQL, to the next step in the development of a vocabulary for the fully adult thinking process. That next step, which has a technical name that someone mentioned in an earlier Comment, is enabled by first learning SQL. SQL is a more concrete language, halfway between a language suitable for our juvenile, concretizing thinking processes and our adult ones, which can handle correctly problems which require abstract thinking and language, without the error of first concretizing the problem. Learning SQL–highly standardized and extraordinarily stable–is an aid to learning data modeling, which has the level of standardization and stability typical of the programmer’s video-game culture: none.
I can spell SQL. I’m a functional consultant – I understand the client’s business and the applications to manage them. I have people to do the SQL stuff. ;-)
I’m sure I’ve told this one on here before, but…
What is the difference between a software salesman and a used car salesman? The used car salesman KNOWS when he’s lying.
I have no idea what any of you are talking about, but here’s a picture of the Wienermobile.
I know Basic, Fortran IV with WATFOR and WATFIV, and Forth. Well, I used to know them . . .
I’m waiting eagerly to learn the command(s) you can run from your own PC that will open the necessary firewall ports (all along the chain) and establish credentials in Ricochet’s database.
I happen to know for a fact that Norbert Wiener drove a Chevy.
If you start asking us to put our knowledge in Fourth Normal Form I am leaving.
Is Third Normal Form alright?
[ Directs Stern Look of Disapproval at Arahant. ]
Boyce-Codd Normal Form?
Chortling Out Loud!
Seriously, no, there is no chance of the IT community suddenly enabling users to use SQL! They won that battle 30 years ago. The trends since then been in the same direction.
Personally, I am looking for a language that possesses the qualities of SQL, but which will allow me to program my computer so Windows, HP or other nefarious forces cannot override my decisions to not update to Windows 11, etc.
Of course people say “Linux” but then I have no idea which version would be stable in the way SQL happens to be.
I’m running two different versions that are more stable than Windows ever was.
After reading the Comments, including this one, I’ve realized that I miscommunicated badly, and that no one much had a clue what I was saying. That often happens.
What I really wanted to say is that by serendipity I learned a programming language and it turned out to be a life-changing, beautiful, surprising experience that had nothing necessarily to do with programming, but instead taught me a new way of thinking, and that I hope that others in the future, like future generations, have the same experience.
I’m also still wondering why I should listen to someone telling me that I should learn a language when, based on the post title, he doesn’t have a particularly strong command of English.
Just teasing @markcamp!
No, Mark. That’s not what happened.
That’s nice, and perfectly reasonable. A great start to a somewhat technical conversation.
You accompanied that with utterly illogical whoppers, which were pointed out.
You doubled down, and the collection of whoppers were then justly mocked and ridiculed.
You are now trying to rewrite the story & recast your role. I’m not buying it.
Wasn’t the point (at least in large part) that learning SQL is a good training exercise in learning how to speak and write clearly? In particular, that it’s good training in learning how to refer to specific things and make statements about them?
You are probably right about that, and it is a skill most people need to learn better. Had I world enough and time I would be interested in reconsidering the whole Trivium! Maybe a good programming language should be added to language and logic and rhetoric as a basic tool of learning.
I don’t know. I might buy it since it makes the post make a bit more sense.
I would think though it only had the impact because of all the other stuff in Mark’s head at the time, so unless we’re going to make Mark’s young life the prerequisite for high school SQL, it won’t have the same result.