Re: tools for PL/SQL development

"Daniel Morgan" <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:1077348319.23245_at_yasure...
...

> You are limiting yourself to a small subset of the languages on this
> planet ... I have students from many countries ... and to only a single
> operating system. What good is all that GUI training when you get a job
> and your boss shows you to your Ultra 5 workstation?
>
> If a developer can't work in SQL*Plus they are marginal at best. A DBA
> that can't work in vi ... I'll restrain myself but imagine Sybrand's
> response.

Oh dear. As one who got stuck in Adelaide on a server without pico, I inventively (or so I thought) FTP'd the init.ora over into notepad, and then ftp'd it back, rather than face the wrath of vi.

I guess that means I am a crap DBA. Probably not far from the truth, actually.

Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Note to myself: Control+V is not eVil. Control+K will not Kill you.

Let me add my tuppence ha'porth anyway. I can't teach syntax (well, OK, I can, but the students can learn that stuff from the Big Boys Book of Syntax, and I can add very little value there). What I teach is, er, understanding (well or badly, that's another story). And I find that understanding has nothing to do with the tool, and everything to do with the way it's taught.

I tend to find that with a GUI, strange to say, the interface gets in the way. People are forever wondering what a particular icon means, or where they find a menu option. They spend so long wondering about where to go in the interface, they forget why they're in the interface in the first place.

When there is no GUI, there is no distraction... except they have to know the syntax, and trying to get the syntax right is just as much a barrier to understanding as not knowing where to click, so there is a distraction after all.

So GUI or CLI, makes no difference. The difference comes from those that can see the big picture, and retain some sense of what they're trying to achieve, and those that get bogged down in the minutiae of whatever interface they happen to be confronted with.

I've thought long and hard about whether people should be made to do it CLI before being shown the GUI way, on the grounds that going via the CLI, they learn how to do it "properly". And I've come to the conclusion that argument is complete b****cks, because at the end of the day, we're here to satisfy business needs, not execute some theoretical piece of SQL in a theoretically perfect manner. So long as people know what they're doing and why, and can achieve it when the chips are down, that's the goal. The tools they use to do all of that is a matter of personal choice and, fundamentally, complete indifference.

Anyway.

Yours not in vi
HJR Received on Sat Feb 21 2004 - 04:42:30 CST