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Jonathan Robie wrote:
> Reminds me of the people who thought that managers would be able to read
> COBOL programs even if they couldn't program, since COBOL has such
> natural English-based syntax.
Apparently SQL was designed with similar goals, too, which is why I now
have to suffer when the smart run-time query optimiser Gets It Wrong and
I have to write contorted SQL to trick the optimiser into scanning the
tables in the right order when doing a join :-)
Attempts to make programming possible for the non-programmers always
seem to end in failure. The lesson to learn is that the hard part of
programming isn't the syntax - it's the mindset.
Things like ColdFusion attempted to make server-side scripting easy for
people coming from an HTML background by making all the commands look
like elements and attributes, but it seemed to just spawn a load of
badly implemented Web sites. It provided an easier learning curve on the
*syntax* than PHP or ASP or whatever, but you still needed to understand
HTTP, SQL, Web security, string processing, ...
>
> Jonathan
>
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