Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
Yes. That was the whole point.
This triggers a lot of thoughts. One of them that I decided to leave out of the post is that although SQL thoroughly teaches one organizational scheme for thinking and speaking (saying and asking), it leaves out at least one more: recursive subclassing, the “is_a” relationship. Categorical logic, the language of Aristotle. I am led from that to how it helped me think formally about Platonic idealism. Clearly I need to stop there before things get out of control.
Right on!
In that case, the post was clear enough, I thought.
Woo hoo! That’s good.
I dig. I also need to quit. I have a categorical logic video to record.
Phil,
A conversational dialog requires mutual respect, and although I respect your integrity and honesty, you don’t respect mine.
Personal attacks of this intensity make it difficult for me to attempt to return to the discussion of the subject at hand. If you don’t hear back from me, that’s why.
I want to, and used to, but in recent months it has been hard. It could be me, but I think it isn’t.
Perhaps you can construct a logical query to examine the emotions I’ve triggered. It might lead to insight as to inapplicability of SQL to so much of our unstructured, chaotic human condition. Especially the parts that aren’t amenable to data collection. Your OP says this:
When I read this, I assumed satire. No-one familiar with SQL could possibly believe this. And then you seemed serious in your follow-ups.
If it is satire, and I misread the rest, I will apologize. Please enlighten me.
Fair enough. I’ll stop here. Unless I need to apologize for not recognizing satire.
I don’t have too. You have to prove it does. I don’t think this thread supports the proposition in the OP.
;)
I did the same working with XML and SGML
Well that brings back memories. Working in finance at Hughes Aircraft in the late eighties I was one of the first to be trained in SQL in order to access the new data warehouses that were being developed. It’s very useful to be one of very few who know how to do something!
Pure logic and math are real enough.
It’s everything else that’s a little fuzzy.
Sorry, I deferred defining the terms till I knew someone would care what I was saying.
By the “real world” I mean the world about which true facts cannot be known by logic alone. (This kind of knowledge has been labeled “synthetic”)
By the unreal world I mean the other one, about which “analytic” knowledge is possible.
So the really real one is the “unreal” one?
By my definition (see Comment #69), the one I call real is real and the one I call unreal is unreal. By your definition, the one I call unreal is real and the one I call real is unreal.
That’s an example of the famous “Camp’s First Law of Dialog”: If you want a meaningful answer, you must ask a meaningful question: ensure that all the definitions and assumptions are known and agreed by writer and reader. We are here for Conservative Conversation, which includes dialog.
I take your question as serious not because I think you meant it to be, but because at least for some it is.
I meant it to be serious. My definition is the one you’ll find in a dictionary.
My faith in dictionaries ends around 1950.
I’m with you on that, though it’s not related to the current thread. The Progressivist march through our institutions started marching noticeably through the dictionary around then. The assault in the present day is getting bolder and advancing faster. But much slower than the rest of the front. Dictionaries are naturally sheltered from the full force of the violence, much as relativity theory was somewhat sheltered from the Nazi’s Progressivist march, even though a Jew discovered it.
@saintaugustine
I loved your measured reply to Saint Augustine until the part where you said he wasn’t serious.
This is ricochet’s Saint Augustine we are talking about!! Of logical, philosophical and analytical training.
St. Augustine understands how I think, write, and read very well, and I know the same about him. Because of that, I knew he would feel free to be either serious or not, knowing that I would try to figure it out. This was a coin toss and I asked for clarification and he gave it.
So, you shouldn’t be unhappy about it. You should love all of my reply, even that part. We worked it out.
Conversation as a problem to be solved. Break and go to your corners. At the bell, Holmesian deductions at ten paces.
Those are inductions.
And the HKer deflects into HVAC theory.