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Comment by sleiben | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Git.

Eh, I’ve seen various things like Git come and go. I spent the majority of my career in the days before git existed and we used things like SVN. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Git supplanted. I would be surprised to see SQL supplanted.

Git is a bit newer, and there have been many attempts to solve the same problem it solves, but it solves that specific problem VERY well... it'll be a long time before it's dethroned in my opinion.

Git is surprisingly only 17 years old while SQL is 48 years. Not that you’re wrong, it’s just interesting how comparatively newer it is

Also, git had major competition for almost half of that time where it was not clear at all what software people would settle on (or even if they they would actually settle down).

SQL was nearly undisputed its entire life. It quickly killed every previous architecture, and everything that came after it made a point on being compatible.

>It quickly killed every previous architecture

This feat was much easier to achieve when the industry was much, much smaller, and a single company mostly owned the entire business sector (who were the people that needed databases in the first place).

Well, a single company with a huge unexplainable help from the US government.

But SQL stayed unopposed due to its qualities, not because of its iffy start.

SQL is at least 30 years older than Git. Git has yet to prove its longevity in the same way.

That statement will be true forever. It doesn’t tell you much.

Let me restate in relative terms then. SQL is over twice as old as Git. When Git was originally released, SQL had been around for longer than Git has been today. Git has had a pretty good track record, but it's not comparable yet in terms of age or even in terms of mass adoption -- plenty of orgs don't use Git to manage their code.

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