It's shocking how many developers are afraid of SQL, it hurts my soul.

I honestly don't get it, it's not rocket science, and compared to freakin MongoDB it's a Sunday walk in the park.

20+ years ago no one was afraid of it. Our front end web folk were doing SQL quite happily. Now they can't even consume an API without problems.

I think the demand for staff has lowered standards considerably.

20 years ago (or more like 30-40), software actually did something for the user and wasn't just a ZIRP hack to make billions courtesy of Google and friends. Once the money became the entire point, once line go up, you just need to be able to fog a mirror long enough to get acquired. The number of supposedly senior developers who send me screenshots of stack traces they haven't even read makes me want to day drink heavily. I'm thinking of starting a bakery.

Yeah nailed it there. Totally agree.

I was going to start a grilled cheese van!

In other words, people would rather make many tiny, seemingly easy steps than a few really impactful but seemingly arduous steps.

Teach SQL a spoonful at a time then, I suppose. Do not start from having the students to read Codd's original papers.

OTOH SQL is not the best language: it's both too wordy and too terse, it's not composable in many important cases, it does not map nicely to set-theoretic operations. But a transpiler to SQL that would offer a vastly better experience is yet to take the world by storm.

Totally agree!

I was thinking of this quote about regex, apt in this situation:

"A programmer had a problem with Sql. So he thought of using an ORM. Now he has two problems"

Choose your battles wisely

> taking some time to learn a standard, SQL.

One huge problem is that learning SQL will take you nowhere, unless your schema consists of a few tables with a handful of rows at most.

There is no standard SQL, and there is no serious application development without having to delve into the sanctum sanctorum of your database vendor.

This is, quite frankly, bullshit. SQL fundamentals transcend a given RDBMS. And when they don't, boo hoo, learn the syntax of your particular database flavor. We need not be so precious.