[gaius]

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...

[rabidrat]

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..