Re: PL/pgSQL 2

On Sep 1, 2014, at 10:45 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> What is actually being proposed, AFAICS, is a one-shot fix for a bunch
> of unfortunate choices. That might be worth doing, but let's not fool
> ourselves about whether it’s one-shot or not.

Well, one shot every 18 years is not so bad.

I am only a casual user and as such probably do not merit much consideration from the experts here. I only work with PL/pgSQL occasionally, but never go weeks without doing it and sometimes it is all I do for weeks.

That said and this being the internet, IMO working in PL/pgSQL is only slightly better than stabbing myself in the leg with a knife compared to other non-PL/pgSQL languages I work in. Mostly my hate is directed at the silly quoting. But it has lots of other quirks that are not all that obvious unless you work with it all day every day.

Now I could use other languages as was suggested upstream. Lets see, I use R all the time, but R is not a first class language, not in core, and its slow. Python 3 would be acceptable to me, but its untrusted. tcl I don’t know and don’t want to learn as no one else seems to use it (in my world anyway). perl is the only possibility left and again, no one in my world is using Perl and it’s not clear if there is a performance penalty. The docs say the best language for performance is PL/pgSQL after pure SQL.

Really, this is from the docs

a_output := a_output || '' if v_'' ||
referrer_keys.kind || '' like ''''''''''
|| referrer_keys.key_string || ''''''''''
then return '''''' || referrer_keys.referrer_type
|| ‘'''''; end if;'';

That should be enough alone to suggest postgreSQL start working on a modern, in core, fast, fully supported language. Of course PL/pgSQL works, but so did one-line 5k perl programs that nobody likes today. Everything can be done in assembler, but no one suggests that today. Today, it is all about programmer productivity. PL/pgSQL has a lot of unnecessary stuff that sucks the life out of programmer productivity. And this should be very much a concern of the professionals that support PostgreSQL

For example:

DECLARE
declarations
BEGIN
statements
END

This looks a lot like COBOL or Pascal, and today is mostly unnecessary.

So my opinion would be to keep PL/pgSQL and adopt a new PL language that is fully supported, fast, and modern, that will over time replace PL/pgSQL.

Neil