SQL is complete but ugly: everything is expressible, but nothing is reusable; simple ideas are complex to express; the language is verbose and lacks smart defaults.
It begs for examples of the ugly/verbose/complex SQL and the beautiful/succinct/simple Malloy. Looking at the samples folder did no work for me.
Think of a sales orders table. Think of all the orders in there that should be considered "invalid" for some reason or another.
It would be awesome to define some logic, one time, in one place, for "invalid orders" and then have end users be able to say "from invalid orders", "stores having no invalid orders", "customers with multiple invalid orders", "top 3 reasons orders are invalid" ...
And of course "valid orders" might just be defined as "not invalid orders"
Instead this is probably multiple views, CTEs, UDFs, and still some logic in the main query to handle NULLs or joins or whatnot.
Even little things like hierarchies - I don't want to have separate sprocs for salesByCountry, salesByRegion. salesByState,and then an umbrella dynamic sproc to figure out which one to call.
It's ironic because SQL is such a human friendly declarative language that it has such poor ability to create meaningful shorthand expressions.
I've written SQL for nearly 30 years, I love it, but natural language transpilers have shown me some of its limits as an expressive tool.
It's a separate system, which has downsides. As an upside, by being a component of your system, the integrations with monitoring, alerting, quality checks, and dashboards is usually pretty easy.
Can you recommend any good implementations of the ideal state? I worry that SQL is too much to learn, but natural language is way too ambiguous to map to anything resembling logic. (The best we can do, for natural logic -> executable logic is legislative code... And the ambiguity there is famous.)
Having worked in a Coffeescript codebase for the past couple of years, its horrible to read. It just turns into a giant mess with multiple layers of nesting and everything just kind of mushed together. Coffeescript looks fun to play with, but having it in a large production codebase is an exercise in confusion and frustration. It lets people be clever with their code. Don't be clever.
Not mentioned by others, http://atlantic.net starts at $5 a month. DigitalOcean has a similar offer with much better documentation. I run a couple of larger servers at DigitalOcean and am really satisfied with uptime, management console, etc. So my vote goes for DigitalOcean.
But Atlantic had a 256Mb RAM, 10Gb disk option years ago for just $0.99 I still have one server there for hosting static HTML, running some scraping tasks, MS document to PDF conversion service (Python Twisted) for a customer, etc. All that for just $1.20 a month (including VAT)
If you're looking for a cheaper alternative then https://clusterhat.com/ is worth taking a look. I have one sitting on my desk (4 Pi Zero nodes and Raspberry Pi 2 controller).
I work from home 1-3 days a week. I'm also father of 3 boys (2, 8, 10) and wife is working full-time.
My only setup is my ThinkPad T450s. That's all.
At some point in my carrier I used 4 monitors, specific low profile keyboards and mice at the office but I don't miss that. It took some time (years!) to adjust my workflow to a single screen and maybe I'm not as productive as I could be but I'm still among the most productive employees at my company.
What I achieved is that I'm equally productive and +/- comfortable anywhere: at work, on the couch or office room at home, on a train, at airport, in the garden, anywhere. That consistency is more important to me than maximum efficiency.
So that and I choose what kind of tasks I work on when I'm alone or when family is at home because you can't expect to fully isolate yourself.
