Comment by garyclarke27

SQL certainly does not suck as a language, unfortunately this is a very common perception, almost a (false) consensus within the developer community. I changed careers from Finance - I was a ACA (akin to CPA) , wizard at Excel VBA etc - to software development, after 10 years learning, I’m now finally also proficient with SQL. I have also learnt other langauges, but SQL is by far my favourite, Yes it has some mistakes in it’s design - the biggest being SELECT before FROM, Yes some key words, esp windows functions, have a silly length - this creates an impression of verbosity but SQL is actually the opposite, it is far more expressive than any Object Oriented language I can think of. 1 line of code, say a window function with a filter clause in Postgres is the equivalent of pages of Java code. Lateral Joins enable chaining, Views CTEs and Functions provide simple safely scoped composability. Postgres has incredible aggregation and analysis ability, built in out of the box. It’s String manipulation capabilities are wondrous, a 1 line StringAgg function can achieve the same as pages of VBA code - you may scoff but VBA with it’s ancient horrible editor is still necessary, if you are in Excel, is Javascript that much less verbose though? Pure SQL Postgres Functions are amazing, you can chain them, you can easily make them pure, they can include fast recursion and conditional logic. I never delete data, just append, a bitemporal immutable functional db is so powerful, enabling time travel and rock solid data integrity. Mat Views or Indexes or summary tables are easily created and often automatically. They provide an efficient reliable cache layer, which can address most performance issues that may arise