Tangential question: I'm curious how many people (here on HN, or in general) learned SQL before they learned more traditional programming (e.g. Python, Java, C)? I learned traditional programming (through college) and only stumbled upon SQL years later (someone left a "How to use Microsft Access" book around at work).
I absolutely love SQL, and am in the middle of writing a book on how to use just SQLite for large, complicated data work. My target audience is programmers, but also non-programmers, because I think SQL is vastly easier to learn than something like Python. The tradeoff of course is that SQL is much more limited a framework, but it's more than enough to do data work (all the stuff that isn't visualization or complex stats).
When I lived around Palo Alto, I met a few recent grads who didn't study STEM in college, but ended up working for tech firms in content and analytics roles. They'd know Excel and Tableau, but through co-workers, would pick up SQL to make their data work easier. But they hadn't yet had learned general programming, or tried Python/Javascript.
But I can't imagine many other professional or academic career paths in which someone who ends up learning and using both Python and SQL started out with SQL, then learned Python (i.e. general programming). Would would they have done with SQL in school, or as a hobby?
When I graduated University in 2003, I took a front desk job doing business reporting and running adhoc queries. I did this work for many years in a variety of places, always working with a different type of database in each company. There's so much depth to relational data modeling and SQL. Many, many ways to design queries. I didn't get into hardcore application development until many years later.
I've forgotten some of the more advanced SQL that I've written over the years. I look back at SQL I've written as if I'm reading someone else's work.
I enjoy working with postgres but miss the temporary table workflow in sybase.
I'm a data engineer and I learned SQL before I learned python. I started out as a marketing specialist (mostly working in Google AdWords), then I graduated up to BI Analyst, and eventually to data engineer. I've picked up 100% of my python in my current job.
What did you think of Python, and was it difficult to grasp the differences between the two languages/paradigms? I ask because, for myself, any general language I pick up (Ruby,Python,JS,R), I have a good idea of underlying concepts like memory pointers and garbage collection, even if it's all abstracted by the language. With SQL, I have an incredible ignorance of the most basic programmatic concepts, like how to define variables or custom functions. The deepest underlying concept I have of SQL is that it has a query planner that does all the thinking for me.
Yeah, the learning curve was pretty steep for me. I've been learning some C# for my job, and it's been a lot easier after learning basic Python. SQL is kind of weird in the sense that starting out is very very very easy, but mastering it is incredibly hard. I've been writing SQL everyday for about 3 years and I'm still blown away with what the SQL experts at my company can do with the language. I see presentations at conferences that make me feel like an absolute beginner.
I learned SQL in high school as my first "programming" class, though that's more of a quirk of how I moved through the curriculum. This was prior to learning C++ and then transitioning to Python some years later.
It was both language and database theory, all focused on Oracle. IIRC, it was titled "Database Administration", but I remember having to draw out schema diagrams and learn all the particular arrow types (one-to-one, one-to-many, etc) and what different block shapes meant in the diagram. All that only to get into industry 5 years later and find no one goes beyond basic squares and maybe double-ended arrows in practice >.>
I absolutely love SQL, and am in the middle of writing a book on how to use just SQLite for large, complicated data work. My target audience is programmers, but also non-programmers, because I think SQL is vastly easier to learn than something like Python. The tradeoff of course is that SQL is much more limited a framework, but it's more than enough to do data work (all the stuff that isn't visualization or complex stats).
When I lived around Palo Alto, I met a few recent grads who didn't study STEM in college, but ended up working for tech firms in content and analytics roles. They'd know Excel and Tableau, but through co-workers, would pick up SQL to make their data work easier. But they hadn't yet had learned general programming, or tried Python/Javascript.
But I can't imagine many other professional or academic career paths in which someone who ends up learning and using both Python and SQL started out with SQL, then learned Python (i.e. general programming). Would would they have done with SQL in school, or as a hobby?