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Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

While semantically weak languages are appealing at first, all they end up doing is encoding the intrinsic problem domain complexity implicitly. This results in “brittle code” and the inability to adapt.

In short, powerful languages exist because they need to exist.

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That's not true though. SQL is not computationally complete. It does abstract over the complexity of access to relational data. And it is still used and useful. SQL is also not automatically brittle.

There is a problem of a language gap, a mismatch between SQL structures and internal types, and all in all maybe a gap in typed code and unit tests.

That does not mean you should implement your own database.

Plain SQL is not turning complete, however SQL/PSM is and something along those lines is supported by (most?) database implementations like PostgreSQL, Oracle SQL, MySQL, etc. Seems to me like SQL is a perfect example of most people agreeing that the extra power/complexity is indeed a requirement.

Not sure the extensions were really needed though. Certainly the gaps could be filled externally and in a lot of shops it's what's mandated. I think an argument could be made that the extentions you're bringing up is more about a turf war between DBA's and Developers than about neccessity.

Most of the time, the SQL queries are only useful when they are part of a bigger application, which is often written using a Turing complete language.

This is a sign of a semantically weak language used in the wrong place.

Which is inevitable, I guess. If it can be abused to make complex systems, it will be abused.

It's not inevitable. Carefully ringfencing the capabilities of a weaker language and making sure that it is as powerful as is necessary enables you to have something conceptually simpler, easier to maintain and easier to read while maintaining the necessary level of expressive power.

There are lots of examples where DSLs achieve this goal and the result is really nice and, unfortunately, a lot where they don't.

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