this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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This doesn't make sense to me. SPs and functions are in every major database. If I wrote a bash script that runs like a program, and sounds like a program, did I program it? Script it?
And lots of systems have nested logic in the DB, optimization often leads to that to reduce overhead. Unless you're being lazy with an ORM like prisma that can't even join properly.
Getting high performing queries is just as difficult as any other programming language, and should be treated as such. Even Lemmy's huge performance increases to .18ish came from big PG optimizations.
It seems to be about yelling at others that "you're not a real programmer!!!" mixed with being so "technically correct" my eyes can no longer roll the same way they used to.
It's mostly ignorance. People tend to underestimate or dismiss things they don't completely understand.
Admittedly, this discussion is more one of semantics than anything. It's pretty clear I'm arguing that SQL is not a "General Purpose Language," and that proficiency in that domain is what constitutes programming. Which, yeah, is arguably somewhat arbitrary. But my point is that, colloquially, someone who only works with SQL isn't a programmer. Data Engineer, sure. DBA. Also, sure. Depends on what you do. Programmer? Not really. Not unless you (as in the person, not "it's theoretically possible") can use raw SQL to read in video data from a linux system device file and then encode it to mp4 and just nobody's told me.
Do that in Javascript. Or HTML. Or CSS. Or by that logic is a web developer not a programmer? What about microcontroller programmers?
I could easily write a full logic program in SQL where the API just feeds it data, which is the inverse of how you treat SQL. Admittedly that's not as common, but it happens pretty frequently in areas of big data, like medical.
I've hired Senior Software Engineers that were DBAs, and others that weren't. They were a development team, all programmers in their own right.