An impulse buy at the supermarket, and I am now the proud possessor of a fourteen-piece knife set. Actually, the box only had thirteen out of the fourteen knives. Maybe that’s why it was discounted half off. I’m still six knives ahead, the way I figure it. Regardless, I can’t complain, because really I only wanted the chef knife. My philosophy of cooking says that if it can’t be done with an 8″ chef’s knife, it’s probably not worth doing. Maybe a serrated bread knife. But that’s it. What am I supposed to do with six steak knives? Do you know the last time I had half-a-dozen friends over for steak dinner? Never, that’s when.
At work I’m doing a fun little project that requires me to learn SQL. Now I hear you asking, “What kind of self-respecting web guy can go this long without learning SQL?” My response: see the key word, “self-respecting”. (Not only that, I don’t know a damn thing about Perl either1. So there.)
Fortunately, SQL is a lot of fun. The simpler SQL queries almost sound like English sentences… just add a couple articles here and there. “Select all names from the employee database where the title is “Admin” and age is less than 40.” Of course you can make things much more complicated, but the point still stands. It seems pretty natural and simple to me. I guess that’s how they wanted to do things in the 70s back when SQL was invented. Compare that to a more “modern” language like XSL/XSLT, with all those long command names and where trying to do a simple loop requires tail-recursion and ooooh, my head is already starting to hurt. Minimalism, I tell you. It’s a good thing.
1. To qualify my statement of ignorance a bit, I have to admit that this page has a small Perl wrapper. And of course the 404 page for this site uses Perl to select the random message. So put me down for “near-ignorance”. Sorry about any confusion.