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Comment by nickpeterson | Hacker News Reader

I tell new developers that SQL is one of those few things in our field you get to keep forever.

That JavaScript framework that takes a year to understand will no longer be used in 7 years. SQL is going to be here forever and learning it is useful your whole career.

Other common entries on this list of forever tools: regular expressions, emacs, bash/shell scripting, excel, probably more I’m forgetting.

Devs always push back on the suggestion to learn something like excel (actually learning it, not just clicking around), but when they first start they really underestimate how often it’s the tool the business speaks and feels comfortable giving feedback on technical questions in.

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> that JavaScript framework that takes a year to understand will no longer be used in 7 years.

Surely there is a lot more nuance for having a nicer database query language than comparing it to JS frontend practices.

SQL is something that'll stick for a long time, but I support attempts from people that don't want to let SQL be the endgame.

Of course don't go around deploying highly experimental shiny things on production! :P

Nuance? Not really. Bullshit flash in the pan tech stacks are what they are regardless of how much marketing drapery one adorns them with.

>> Other common entries on this list of forever tools: regular expressions, emacs, bash/shell scripting, excel, probably more I’m forgetting.

Oh yes, many more: Java, JCL & COBOL, Windows Forms, PhP, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Perl, Visual Basic, IIS, SSIS, Ruby on Rails, and so on and so forth.

Maintaining enterprise software is a special circle of hell reserved for developers. Just sayin'.

The problem is that a lot of developers consider things forever tools when they are not forever tools and not even close. SQL is one of the forever tools, but even in your short list I would absolutely strike down two of them as "forever tools". They're more like "my favorites that I've invested decades into".

Forever is a stretch, maybe “until the end of my career” tools. That list of tools could eventually be replaced, but I bet whatever comes after them will be forced to adopt a lot of their metaphors to gain acceptance. For instance, maybe excel eventually gets replaced, but the thing that kills it will feel a lot like it. The experience won’t be wasted, useful things you learned to do in it will continue to be useful in the new tool.

Which 2 would you strike down out of interest?

I wholeheartedly agree that engineers massively underestimate the power of Excel.

> how often it’s the tool the business speaks and feels comfortable giving feedback on technical questions in.

Yes, but as often as not business people end up using Excel as a glorified text editor with built-in tabular formatting. Some of the spreadsheets I've been handed by project stakeholders would make 90s-era pre-CSS HTML using tables for formatting look clean and simple by comparison.

After writing applications in "4GL" sql tools early in my career, I've spent the entirety of the rest of my career trying to avoid writing SQL or having anything to do with the inner guts of those gigantic global variables known as relational databases.

> That JavaScript framework that takes a year to understand will no longer be used in 7 years. SQL is going to be here forever and learning it is useful your whole career.

Nothing seems more ephemeral than JavaScript framework du jour.

I tell new developers that SQL is one of those few things in our field you get to keep forever. --- I'm not so sure anymore. Look what is happening with css... every simple thing will be killed and replaced with something complex, so you could achieve less with much more effort.

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