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Re:Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret by djb on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @10:57PM (#301020)
"SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing."

—Philip Greenspun, http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2005/03/07/how-long-is-th...

Re:Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret by Xichekolas on Thursday September 11, 2008 @02:21AM (#301169)
While I'd agree with Lisp and Haskell, I not sure how SQL could be considered that dense. I often find myself frustrated that a split second thought takes so long to express as a query, and I type a decent 80wpm or so.
Re:Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret by henning on Thursday September 11, 2008 @03:08AM (#301202)
I always assumed he was referring to complicated ad-hoc queries that involve all kinds of joins and so forth.

If I understand you correctly, yes, typing "select ... from ... where id = ..." would get old very fast.

Re:Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret by Xichekolas on Saturday September 13, 2008 @02:28AM (#302994)
Well I was actually talking about writing queries that involve a join or two. Thinking to myself "I can get this by grabbing all these via joining on that where x = y" doesn't take very long, but typing that out can be annoying if you do it often enough.

Of course, if you are constantly writing 8-way joins with fun things like group_concat in the select clause, I guess it would require a little more thought than typing. Also, I'd imagine the people that spend their days writing stored procedures, triggers, and the like spend more time thinking than typing, but I can't claim to be one of those people.