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by zachrose 1400 days ago
Imagine wanting to learn Postgres but not knowing how to use a package manager, for example
1 comments

Is this even a possibility?
1000%. Lots of people want to do data analysis, learn SQL, all that kind of stuff, without having to learn a load of other unrelated development crap. Think of all the people out there using Excel who want to take the next step.
After browsing this site for a couple of years, I made an account to reply to your comment and say, "This is exactly right" lol. I'm a teacher who uses Excel for basic stuff (power query, pivot tables), but I'm also using Excel as a "database", which is obviously not a good idea.

So here I am trying to take the next step and learn SQL along with good database design, but learning these things through Postgres is really not appropriate for someone like me. I think I have to swallow my pride and start with Access or something.

You may want to try https://dbeaver.io/ + SQLLight for the start.

You just download binary for your OS, create a db as described here (https://www.sqlite.org/quickstart.html) and then connect to it with dbeaver.

This is more the enough to get familiar with SQL.

No shame in using Access! It's actually part of how I got my start in tech. Started with an Access database, started writing macros for it in VBA, then started writing VB.NET, then convinced a higher up to give me access to a SQL Server database.

I was in an industry with an absurd number of boilerplate forms that needed to be printed and the ability to create Access forms that automated all the manual filling out coworkers were doing felt like magic. Postgres doesn't really have an equivalent of that.

Yes. See this survey on Twitter from the other day - LOADS of "React" developers (aka front-end developers) are deterred from learning more about backend programming due to friction like this. https://twitter.com/rachelnabors/status/1558888478955421697
I still kind of lost here.

I know this much about frontend development too but I was sure that you still need a package manager to install your npm\yarn and other tools.

PS: Obviously you can live without one. Regardless of being backend\frontend developer.

PPS: and honestly, how can you be scared of postgresql and co. after webpack? If you can actually understand this crap postgres setup should be to easy for you.

Yeah I personally find Webpack a whole lot scarier than PostgreSQL / package managers, but that's down to my previous career experience.

Really the key thing here is that learning new things is hard, and anything that can be done to remove potential roadblocks is worthwhile. I've talked to so many people who were put off learning Python because they couldn't get to a working development environment on their own.

> If you can actually understand this crap postgres setup should be to easy for you.

You can figure almost anything out if you spend enough time reading documentation and noodling with it. I'd still rather spend that time solving my actual problem.

You don't really need webpack or etc for this, you can just hit some page that hosts the wasm already.
Just to be clear: I was not talking about the project at crunchydata.com. I merely say that in my opinion modern js development routine is much more complicated that postgres setup
LOADS of React "developers"
People who come from Windows + MSSQL world might not have touched a package manager before and want to try out Postgres.