I apologize if I've misrepresented your concerns. I'm operating from a perspective of a decade and change of doing this dance over and over:
Engineer: "SQL is dumb and hard!"
DBA: "What part?"
Eng: describes problem
DBA: describes misunderstanding
Eng: "Oh! Oh, that's actually really simple! Thanks!"
It pretty much never goes the other way. So I'm probably a little over what read like dismissive, mis-premised, or under-informed criticisms. (And, yes, that probably colored the tone of my response. Again, apologies.)
> I believe that this is in large part because how it had to be worked into an existing, weirdly designed language in a backward compatible way.
Is sloppy shoe-horning the fault of the shoe, or the fault of the horn (assuming, for sake of discussion, that it's even sloppily done)? Recursively traversing parent-child (among other) relationships is not a wild, unforeseeable extension of set theory — and that's really all SQL is: a practical expression of set theory with a syntax that (admittedly) sometimes obscures that fact.
EDIT: Re: your edit. As one of my employer's DBAs, it's part of my job to reduce risk, including by passing on candidates I feel inadequately understand databases, or whose attitude evinces a lack of interest in improving that understanding. It's not about "attacking" a lack of competence, so much as avoiding the kind of incompetence that refuses to recognize itself.
If you've ever sat on the interviewer side of that table, you can't even pretend not to have seen entirely too much of that, and you'd pass on someone who didn't think they needed to understand the costs of various forms of, e.g., list traversal, just as quickly.
> I believe that this is in large part because how it had to be worked into an existing, weirdly designed language in a backward compatible way.
Is sloppy shoe-horning the fault of the shoe, or the fault of the horn (assuming, for sake of discussion, that it's even sloppily done)? Recursively traversing parent-child (among other) relationships is not a wild, unforeseeable extension of set theory — and that's really all SQL is: a practical expression of set theory with a syntax that (admittedly) sometimes obscures that fact.
EDIT: Re: your edit. As one of my employer's DBAs, it's part of my job to reduce risk, including by passing on candidates I feel inadequately understand databases, or whose attitude evinces a lack of interest in improving that understanding. It's not about "attacking" a lack of competence, so much as avoiding the kind of incompetence that refuses to recognize itself.
If you've ever sat on the interviewer side of that table, you can't even pretend not to have seen entirely too much of that, and you'd pass on someone who didn't think they needed to understand the costs of various forms of, e.g., list traversal, just as quickly.