"What if SQL was like Elm?"

[u/wheatBread]

https://acadia.engineering/blog/rethinking-database-programming

[u/syklemil]

By Evan Czaplicki,

Oh, it's the actual Elm guy

[u/yarovoy]

I wonder what do they mean by "Verified Migrations".

Because just knowing types is not enough to avoid "body goes on high alert". If you missed that operation is blocking on a table of 10 records, it's fine. But if you missed blocking operation on a table of a some billion records, here down goes you system.

[u/yarovoy → u/yarovoy]

don't ask me how I know this

[u/nnomae]

I've used so many database libraries, ORM layers even stuff like Linq, Elixir's Ecto and many many others. I have to admit though, that after all that nothing is as easy to use, as flexible and as powerful as Rust's SQLx which basically just lets you write raw SQL without it being a massive pain in the ass.

[u/andynzor]

Someone reinvented LINQ for their favorite programming language?

[u/jking13 → u/andynzor]

Once you've been developing for > 10 years, you'll see people rediscover and reinvent everything under the sun.

[u/solve-for-x → u/jking13]

My favourites so far have been AWS Lambda reinventing CGI and Next.js reinventing PHP.

[u/jking13 → u/solve-for-x]

Or protobufs are basically ASN.1 with C-like notation and slightly better serialization rules, but less expressive.

[u/solve-for-x → u/jking13]

The post the other day about Cloudflare's "durable objects" thing made me wonder if someone over there is inadvertently reinventing Erlang. Either that or Python's Zope. Every programming technology from the 90s eventually comes back around again under a different name.

[u/xevz → u/solve-for-x]

Try the 70s, so many new and hip things over the last 20 years have originated from Smalltalk.

[u/atxgossiphound → u/solve-for-x]

Every programming technology from the 90s eventually comes back around again under a different name.

I always just point people to the wizard book (SICP, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Ableson and Sussman). Combined with the standard problem sets, pretty much everything you'll ever re-invent is covered.

[u/PayOdd92 → u/solve-for-x]

Unfortunately nobody got promoted for saying "oh this? There's a library for this"

[u/eo5g → u/jking13]

Couldn't you say that about any binary format?

[u/HappyAngrySquid → u/solve-for-x]

You’re giving Next.js way, way too much credit.

[u/Ma1eficent → u/solve-for-x]

That was on purpose. We missed our perl 5.8 cgi from retail.

[u/Cheeze_It → u/jking13]

Sometimes what was made in the past is pretty shitty, and someone making a new one is the right thing. Not always. But sometimes.

[u/davidalayachew → u/Cheeze_It]

Or it was lipstick on a pig. A good thing on an otherwise pretty bad or terribly outdated tool.

[u/iiiinthecomputer → u/andynzor]

LINQ in turn is to a degree a reinvention from 4GLs like Progress, Plain English etc

[u/sequentious → u/andynzor]

I mean, I've been doing a fair amount of development in older languages that make some LINQ features look like a reinvention.

[u/TheGoodBarn → u/andynzor]

the guy who created the language* reinventing LINQ for his favorite programming language

[u/andynzor → u/TheGoodBarn]

r/technicallythetruth

[u/pjmlp → u/andynzor]

Actually LINQ itself was a re-invention as well, see Confessions of a used programming language salesman from Erik Meijer of Haskell fame, at the time at Microsoft on the .NET team.

[u/Gusfoo]

The article:

What if pine was like elm, but different?

Honestly, Pine Is Not Elm was a godsend as a younger man, didn't need massive amounts of pre-reading to just operate.

That aside, just \h create aggregate next time you run psql.

[u/evincarofautumn]

How does this differ from something like Beam? Like, I already have strong types and verified migrations, although there are still some cases where I can’t use Beam’s migration facilities. I guess Acadia is meant to give better DX and interop across languages?

[u/chubs66]

SQL is perfect. Leave it alone.

[u/heptadecagram → u/chubs66]

Relational algebra is fantastic and deserves far better than SQL.

[u/chubs66 → u/heptadecagram]

did you mean to say "performs"?

[u/heptadecagram → u/chubs66]

It can be both.

[u/weirdoaish]

People would make SQL again

[u/CantaloupeCamper → u/weirdoaish]

And I would help… or at least buy them a beer.

[u/levelstar01]

So you wouldn't be able to pass negative numbers?

[u/fletku_mato]

But what if Elm was like Java, and not the good Java but Java 1.4?

[u/agentoutlier]

I wonder if it is really worthy having leaky abstractions like this or an ORM on top. All these things do is ultimately generate SQL.

This just seems cooler than an ORM because well its Elm and functional programming.

And I would not be that critical if this was like 2 years ago but "SQL <-> to your language types" w/o abstractions is done really well with LLMs. You can hate LLMs but is mapping database data to programming languages types really worth the time of a human even if its automated by a library because then the human has to learn about that library instead of just SQL.

If I did use any of these kind of things I would rather these guys generate SQL at compile time (parameterized or template like or ... god forbid ... the maligned stored procedures).

[u/taw]

That's just ORM with extra steps.

[u/pdoherty926]

This looks compelling and is a really clever answer to the "does Elm run on the server?" question. (FWIW, I still think that's a perfectly reasonable desire and Gren did a great job with their implementation of server-side "Elm".)

The devil is sure to be in the details, though, and I'm curious to see how auth, row-based access and the like will work in practice.

[u/pala_]

Like an email client?

[u/TyrusX]

No. Just no

[u/curien → u/[deleted]]

SQL has been Turing complete since SQL99.

[u/bluegardener → u/curien]

And the point of this article and language wasn't even about turning it into "real" programming language. It was about precise type conversions, verification, and error messages.