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Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

XKCD’s comic on competing standards feels appropriate here:

I don't think treating query languages as a standard is the right comparison here. I think it's great that programming languages have evolved from C or PHP quality languages. I view SQL like PHP, I can write it if I have to, but it's certainly not a language I enjoy working with. EdgeQL has its flaws, but it still looks like a big improvement over SQL to me.

I must be in the minority. I enjoy writing SQL and figuring out clever ways to construct queries to get what I need out of the data. Conversely, I am not a fan of PHP at all, but as you said, will write it if I have to.

EdgeQL looks... interesting, but I need to see more to decide for sure. Would be cool if they built out a translator, so you could pass in SQL and get back EdgeQL.

It's a translator, but in the opposite direction. EdgeDB is a postgres frontend that translates EdgeQL and its schema definition language to SQL which it then sends to postgres. (It can also translate GraphQL to EdgeQL to SQL)

I don't think translating from SQL to take a look at the EdgeQL it produces makes much sense, since it'd result in very unidiomatic queries. SQL prefers joins and flat rows, while EdgeQL is based on following links and has great support for nested data output.

is xkcd ever not appropriate ? there's probably an xkcd about it

Not a munroe original, but I like this one https://thomaspark.co/2017/01/relevant-xkcd/

oh I thought he did that :)

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