MySQL RANT was: PVR or DVR for Linux - NOT MythTV

[jc-8FIgwK2HfyJMuWfdjsoA/w at public.gmane.org (John Chambers)]

Kristian Hermansen commented:
| I could go on and on about software developers who ignore the nature of
| databases. It drives me crazy. You wouldn't put up with a developer who
| didn't understand or know the language they were developing in, why do
| people put up with ignorance about databases if your application uses
| them?
|
| I can categorically say that *any* software developer that chooses MySQL
| without a very specific reason should be fired. The "good enough" excuse
| is laziness.

Hmm  ...   Using  the  same  approach,  I might say that any software
developer that writes a shell script rather than a  "real"  scripting
language  like  perl or python is lazy.  But I'd have to admit that I
write simple shell scripts all the time. Granted, when they get to 10
or  12  lines,  I usually start thinking "This would be better in p*"
and add the punctuation chars to  turn  it  into  the  more  powerful
language.

Larry Wall has pointed out that laziness is one of the attributes  of
a good programmer, and used this as a primary argument for perl.  Why
do something the hard way when there's a tool that lets you do it  in
a simpler way? The fact that a tool isn't general purpose and doesn't
do a lot of other jobs isn't actually a very good argument if  you're
trying to get one job done with a minimum of human effort.

I mean, I know C well enough that I haven't consulted a C manual  for
a couple of decades, but I don't write much my software in C. Most of
the time,  I  use  more  complex  languages  like  perl,  or  simpler
languages  like  the Bourne (again;-) shell.  And sometimes I need to
hit a problem with a  powerful  language  that  makes  low-level  bit
twiddling easy, so I use C.

This seems to be the heart of the argument for mySQL. Not that it's a
good  tool  for  everything.  Just that it's good enough for a lot of
things, and when it isn't, you can use something else.

Of course, to do this with languages or databases or  any  tool,  you
have to be familiar with a few something elses ...


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