Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rabidrat 2743 days ago
I think what happens (and I have this attitude too) is that "learning" SQL takes a weekend...but then you know you'll wind up having to spend a lot longer learning the patterns of the language, and the nuances of the specific dialect, and which of the integration tools will work well with your workflow and pipeline. So while "sure I'll just learn SQL" is great for a personal or school project, when you've got to get something done next week, it's better to take maximal advantage of the tools/skills/workflow that you already have.

IOW, it's not just laziness, it's a kind of professional conservatism. which is partly what gets older engineers stuck in a particular mindset, but it's also a very effective learned skill. The opposite is being a magpie developer, which results in things like MongoDB taking off :)
2 comments
inferiorhuman 2743 days ago
> I think what happens (and I have this attitude too) is that "learning" SQL takes a weekend...but then you know you'll wind up having to spend a lot longer learning the patterns of the language, and the nuances of the specific dialect, and which of the integration tools will work well with your workflow and pipeline.

You have to do the exact same things with Mongo+JS (e.g. learning when to avoid the JS bits like the plague).

link
gaius 2743 days ago
learning" SQL takes a weekend...but then you know you'll wind up having to spend a lot longer learning the patterns of the language,

SQL is a skill that rewards investment in it 1000x over, in terms of longevity. It has spanned people’s entire careers! What’s the shelf life of the latest JS framework, 18 months at most...

link
rabidrat 2742 days ago
Yes, I know that, and that's why I know and use SQL instead of MongoDB. But that's a very similar reason to why I've resisted learning Rust, and Ruby, and React, and Docker, and Scala, and many more. I know I could learn the utter basics in a weekend, but I also know that those basics are utterly useless in a real-world context, and I would prefer to spend the weekend hacking on my open-source project in Python or C, which I've already invested the years into. And that's how engineers age into irrelevance..
link