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On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Monnier, Gary <Gary.Monnier@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Funny how so many believe SQL is "modern". SQL is actually about 40 years old. It was first devised in the early 1970s with Oracle utilizing it in the late 1970s.

Well, to a lot of people, "new to me" is tantamount to "new". ;)

But to be fair, modernity is about much more than age. Java, for
example, is roughly 20 years old now (initial public release in 1995,
though in the works since about 1991). The most stark example of
something defying its age is Lisp, which is one of the earliest
languages around (arguably the second-oldest high-level language,
after Fortran), yet it still has advanced features that are unmatched
in any language today, besides other "dialects" of Lisp.

While SQL is pretty old, it still *feels* modern, the way Lisp still
feels modern. If you are familiar with a lot of languages, you'll
know what I mean. SQL is a very high-level language, much higher than
RPG. How far removed a language is from the "bare metal" of the
hardware is a rough proxy for how modern it will feel.

I'm not against SQL. I'm not against file I/O . I'm not against Non-SQL databases and their data access methods. As always, you use what is best for a given situation or, what you have available.

Certainly no argument there. I like that you included "what you have
available". I'd also like to remind folks that "best" is a very
complex measure, involving lots of competing concerns. There's very
rarely one thing that is so clearly and dominantly best that it's the
only reasonable choice.

I do take exception to SQL being termed "modern" and you must go to SQL-based databases to "modernize". I've stated it many many times: Get away from the terms "modern" and "modernize" when you really mean decouple your database from your user interface.

I agree that sometimes "modernize" is not the best term to use. But
it's often not a horrible term either. To be honest, I think it's
usually used fairly. I think decoupling the database from the user
interface *is* a "more modern" thing to do than tightly coupling them.
Modular is "more modern" than monolithic. RPG IV is definitely more
modern than RPG III. Genuine date fields are more modern than numeric
fields being used as dates. Numeric fields with room for 4-digit
years are more modern than numeric fields with room for only 2.

Really, I don't have much quarrel with "modern" and "modernize" as
long as the *gist* is that there is an effort being put forward to try
to improve things. Not just changing to something new for the sake of
change or for the sake of newness, but *taking advantage* of things
that are *newer* than what we had before, to make things *better* than
what we had before.

John Y.

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