Re: Why is "group by" obligatory in SQL?

From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac>
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:43:08 GMT
Message-ID: <Momam.37978$PH1.29968_at_edtnps82>


Bob Badour wrote:

> paul c wrote:
> 

>> Cimode wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 

>> Great post, Cimode, Djikstra as profound as ever, this stuff bears
>> repeating every so often.
> 
> Dijkstra is da bomb!
> 
> 

>> Too bad so little remains of the history of db language development
>> from the 1970's, I think there are still lessons to be learned from
>> the scanty archives. The motivations of those days must be murky to
>> anybody who didn't grow up with assembler languages, in fact I'd say
>> they remaiin murky for most of the people who were there.
> ...

>> In the commercial world of that time there was a lot of emphasis on
>> so-called 'structured programming techniques', which we know today is
>> just a form of language mysticism, at least insofar as it disguises
>> the real programmer's interface.
> 
> Did you intend the irony?
> ...

It's omnipresent, apparent in the writings of the authors of pretty much all the authors of today's popular web languages, not unlike the irony of the two most written about western world leaders of the last ten years who obviously depend on their belief in God for justifying one or big military invasions, no matter what technical obfuscations their underlings offer up. We are all prisoners of language no matter how logical we pretend to be and no real progress ever happens without several changes of generation (the cryogenic fans conveniently ignore this problem, maybe even some of the more wacky stem-cell researchers too). Received on Fri Jul 24 2009 - 19:43:08 CEST

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