[ErwinSmout]

I doubt that it does. There is way more to "integrating [host] language and queries" than the MIN() of what Micro$oft engineers are (a) capable of understanding and (b) allowed by their own management to put in the products they come up with.

[antonvs]

Your comment may be true of many things that Microsoft does, but not LINQ.

The creator of LINQ was Erik Meijer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Meijer_(computer_scientis...), who was a leading researcher in programming languages and functional programming before shifting into industry. He's well known in the Haskell world for e.g. his work on bananas and lenses, and many other things.

LINQ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query) is basically an embedding of a general monadic framework, augmented with a set of query-specific operators. It can process arbitrary data sources - quoting from the link: "arrays, enumerable classes, XML documents, relational databases, and third-party data sources."

In addition, because it's fundamentally monadic, it can be used to express all sorts of computations, by: "utilizing query expressions as a general framework for readably composing arbitrary computations, include the construction of event handlers or monadic parsers."

LINQ has been ported to PHP, JS & TS, and even Actionscript (although the ports aren't necessarily as capable as the version on .NET, which has language-level support for the features.)

If you're interested in this general subject, I guarantee you you have a lot to learn from LINQ and the research work behind it.

[ErwinSmout]

Dude, please, give me a break.

Erik Meijer is that, eurhm, person, I remember from publicly stating that his favourite resarch method is "throwing things at the wall and see what sticks". WOW. That's the way of the true academic. Of course it might have been the case that he was being really truly utterly facetious/cynical, but I certainly don't recall having any sense of that, not even remotely, upon reading that remark. (And if it means anything to you, I don't recall someone like Dijkstra ever writing anything like that anywhere. But of course Dijkstra was one of the last *TRUE* academics.)

And he is also that, eurhm, person, I remember from "All your databases are belong to us", which drove Chris Date to writing the response he did (published both in the ACM and in his own book "Stating the obvious") in which he publicly shamed the ACM itself for lending its pages to such sheer utter nonsense.

You might want to read the substance. If it shows anything at all, it's the absolute absence of value there is to be found in having a PhD these days.

And there is very, VERY, little in your reply that does not fall either into the category of "argumentum ad verecundiam" or else into that of superficial handwaving.

[antonvs]

You can't really complain about argument from authority when using another authority to rebut the first one.

Date rather missed the point though - in that article, Meijer clearly identified the duality of the "data modeler" vs. "programmer" perspective - "duality" implying that these were two different perspectives on the same problem. He was saying that the programmer perspective had needs, created by the new industry landscape at the time, that weren't being served by existing relational databases. And he was correct on that point, as the rise of NoSQL solutions and databases such as BigQuery have demonstrated. If Meijer was wrong, then the entire industry, including Google, AWS, etc. have been wrong for a couple of decades now. But really, Date was partly indulging in a shooting of the messenger, and partly a nitpick at what he saw as a mischaracterizations. Date's responses were largely irrelevant to Meijer's main points, and he should have known better.

Anyway, I notice that none of your excuses to avoid learning are actually technical objections to what I was recommending. Why fight so hard to find reasons not to learn?

[ErwinSmout]

No, Date did not "miss the point". He properly identified that all of Meijer's arguments he used to make his point were in fact complete bunk. And he clearly and factually answered why that was so, on a blow-by-blow basis. You call that a "nitpick at what he saw as mischaracterizations", I call that "identifying the blatantly ignorant elephant in the room".

The only perspective should be "how can we get information from users (or any other form of information-capturing device in fact), make records of that information and keep those records as long as the information may be needed [and as long as it pays off to keep them], so that we can later get that information back to same [or other] users". Let's call that perspective "HG" for "Holy Grail".

Codd's intent has always been to achieve HG. Date's intent has always been to achieve HG. Both properly identified the core asset we work with : data. It's always ultimately about the data. Both consequentially properly identified the first step needed to make achieving HG possible : a model of data built on foundations of mathematics. (To quote Codd : "database design is not going to be possible if the only concepts available are bits and bytes".) The model of data they came up with is the relational one. And achieving HG is not going to be done by ditching the model of data. On the contrary. It might be achievable by replacing it with some other model of data, but that is going to require exhaustive demonstration of how and why the replacing model of data is better than the relational one, and delivering such exhaustive demonstration is going to require understanding the relational one in the first place. Of the entire mob that is into what you call the "programmer perspective", there is not a single individual that does.

And Date's point in his reply was : neither does Meijer. Backed by evidence, so it was neither "shooting the messenger" nor "a nitpick" but unfortunately it might require understanding the RM to understand the evidence.

To close, I have some hints for you : (1) there ARE NO "existing relational databases" (2) "BigQuery" is not a "database" but a "DBMS" (there's a Dijkstra quote somewhere about how mastery of mathematics and mastery of language fortuitously tend to always come hand in hand - and there's a corollary to that) and (3) yes, the entire industry has indeed been "wrong for decades" because the RM has never been properly understood. See the McGoveran quote on www.dbdebunk.com. Ironically, this grave mistake might be due exactly to "too much programmer perspective" at the time those pseudo-relational systems were built.

[cryptonector]

I also doubt it, though I know nothing about Linkq so I'm loathe comment except in so far as what makes the problem hard (see comments above).

[tehlike]

Microsoft is surprisingly good for creating good developer tools and infrastructure.

[ErwinSmout]

In the perception of the Micro$oft users who are brainwashed with the idea that what Micro$oft does is good for the developers.

(In fact, it might even be outright true. But that's not a guarantee that what the Micro$oft users do with the Micro$oft tools is necessarily also the *BEST* thing for the user of that software product that the Micro$oft users produce.)

[tehlike]

You are being unnecessarily cynical. I left microsoft ecosystem about 10 years ago, but still miss the developer environment they had in 2012 today. Nothing still comes close.

[ErwinSmout]

I invite you to inspect, even if only cursorily, my above exchange with mr. antonvs. My point is that Micro$oft was created by programmers (in fact in its earliest days it was mostly a compilers company), that to this very day the vast majority of what it does falls into the category "by programmers, for programmers", and it may indeed be the case that they are extremely good at that. And if you are yourself a programmer, then it is obviously only self-evident that you are then going to praise/applaud Micro$oft for what they do. It's just that this "programmer perspective" may yield a hopelessly narrowed down tunnel vision on what the real goal should be. That real goal being : making complete sense to the final end-users. And as an example of "not making complete sense" : I open an xls file with multiple sheets in it. I browse through the contents, paging up and down through the sheets. I'm done browsing and I close the file. Microsoft asks me if I want to save my changes. The reason of course (or presumably) being that somewhere hidden inside, there's a "current sheet" indicator and it is considered part of the data because it gets saved alongside the actual sheet contents, so the file can open up with the last sheet displayed already active. But you show me one single user (and especially one not coming from an IT background) who never once in his life reacted to that with "WHAT FRIKKING CHANGES ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT ? I CHANGED NOTHING.".