[tathougies]

I know nothing about category theory. I honestly have never studied it, and don’t plan to. As far as I know, aside from the typical Haskell type classes who people say are based on category theory, beam doesn’t use any esoteric concepts. It is definitely an exercise in engineeeing, not theory.

Beam is based on the relational algebra, which is the basis of SQL. Of course, it doesn’t enable a monkey to write database queries, but it does enable engineers who understand relational algebra to do so.

If your complaint is that you have to understand relational algebra to use a relational database, then your complaint is well out of the scope of beams domain.

Also, I have no idea what you mean about your friend. We can play the personal anecdote game all day long. When I was a JavaScript developer, I saw my fellow devs constantly testing for invariants that would be trivial with Haskell. We use JavaScript at work now too and they access our database indecently. Their queries do not enjoy the advantages beam provides and we’ll be switching to using a Haskell backend service soon instead

[Guthur]

Not sure how you would draw anything about relational algebra from my statement. I love SQL and it's relationship to relational algebra. My only major complaint with sql is the difficulty in being done DRY principles. I like its declarative nature and immediacy when you have a database connection, which is possibly related to what I like about good dynamically type language environments