38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using types

Re:38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using ... by wutbrodo on Monday February 11, 2019 @02:41PM (#19137553)

I have the same rough opinion of ORMs in general and I've never had the occasion to examine it: it was the right choice for our org because there's no way in hell the engineers were going to learn to write good SQL when they could barely write good Python, especially when I'm far from a SQL expert. I was at the time capable of writing good SQL (presumably after a ramp up period), but I doubt my capability to teach it well without significant time investment. The ORM was a path of least resistance thing, providing a simple, easily-comprehensible interface in the language they were already writing.

In the specific context of stuff-is-on-fire, production database changes (I'll reiterate, this place sucked), the fluency of the ORM and its seamlessness with our code was helpful. I don't know much about LINQ, but I gather that the syntax is declarative, which is a perhaps-minor speedbump that would nevertheless have made me less fluent in the specific above-described scenario.

In the general case of engineering, LINQ looks like something I would far prefer.

This isn't a criticism of your comment or anyone else's, but I have to say I'm amused by how all of my responses downthread of my comment are in defense of me being charitable towards more permissive languages (as I said, my bias probably swings solidly the other way, and if I never engineer in a permissive language again, I'll die happy). I kind of assumed it would go the other way, with HN jumping on my comment as elitist or something.

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Re:38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using ... by scarface74 on Monday February 11, 2019 @05:36PM (#19139127)

Every other ORM is bolted on.

For instance if you write the following using LINQ:

var x = from c in customers where c.Age > 65 && c.Sex == “male” select c;

var results = x.ToList():

If customer represents an in memory list, it gets translated as regular old compiled code.

If customer represents a sql database table - it gets translated to SQL and run on the database server.

If customer represents a Mongo collection. It gets translated to a Mongo query.

Of course you can do stuff like switch out what customer represents at runtime and it will be translated appropriately. You also get autocomplete help and compile time type checking.

You can pass the where clause around:

var expression = c.Age > 65;

And pass it into a method.

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