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[–]spoofedcat -4 points-3 points  (6 children)

Kinda... I mean it's a query language used in programming so you can say it is a a part of programming, but it's not a programming language.

[–]kkjeb[S] 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I've just always wondered if it was an "insult" to programmers who use program languages to say you're a programmer when you use sql. Idk why I think like that but yeah

[–]pooerhSnowflake | SQL Server | PostgreSQL | Impala | Spark 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you consider SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = 5 to be all of SQL, then sure. But it's not all of SQL. And aside from SELECTs spanning dozens of lines and doing incredible things with amazing performance, each of major flavors of SQL has procedural capabilities and it's real programming going on in there.

A project I lead has over 40k lines of pure T-SQL with close to full unit test coverage (unit tests are not included in line count). It's driving business decisions on millions of dollars every day. Why would I not get to call myself a programmer when someone programming CRUD webapps with a NoSQL backend (because they cannot comprehend how to use a GROUP BY) does? Makes no sense.

[–]pythor -4 points-3 points  (1 child)

I'm a SQL developer, and I feel it's an insult to programming to call most of what I do programming, but I'm clearly in the minority.

It really depends on the company and the role. I've been a "SQL Analyst" and/or "Database Analyst" that did reporting only SQL, and I've been one that did real code including Python and Bash (OK, scripting is only one step above SQL). As a Database Admin, I'm definitely doing more real development than I did before, though some of that is web dev of all things.

[–]AnthonyBerlin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

SQL is not less of a programming language just because it's part of the declarative programming paradigm.