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Comment by throwitaway222 | Hacker News Reader

Disagree here. JDBC, ODBC, standards are great. There are old tools that can connect to generic databases because of said standards, you just need the right JDBC URL, or perhaps in Windows, ODBC. It's what makes interoperability work amazing things without having to recompile your code.

"hidden monkeypatching" is essentially how all of Java works.

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Lacking much Java experience, I’ll accept this as true.

If so, that’s another reason I’m uninterested in Java. Magic behavior changes based on the prefix of a string passed into a function doesn’t appeal to me at all. The Python equivalent for a database might look like (typed from memory):

  from psycopg import connect
  conn = connect(host, username, password, dbname)

Where connect() returns a database adapter object with DB-API methods. When something breaks, I can see which DB code is involved. It’s right there in the import. My IDE doesn’t have to parse strings to know which code path subsequent method calls are following.

And it worked out super well for everybody in 2021 :)

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