On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 8:11 AM, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On 12/13/2011 08:44 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
>>
>> Rather, I think the point is that embedded Javascript is *extremely*
>> popular, lots and
>> lots of people are supporting it, and we ought to seriously consider
>> doing the same. It's hard to think of another PL that we could add
>> that would give us anywhere near the bang for the buck that Javascript
>> would.
>>
>
>
> Quite. I hate Javascript with a passion, wish it would just go away and
> stop meddling with my life. And even with that context, I think in-core
> PL/V8 would be a huge advocacy win. PostgreSQL has this great
> developer-oriented PL interface, it just doesn't work out of the box with
> any of the "pop" languages right now.
>
> Personal story on this. When my book came out, I was trying to take the #1
> spot on Packt's bestseller list, even if it was just for a day. Never made
> it higher than #2. The #1 spot the whole time was "jQuery 1.4 Reference
> Guide", discussing the most popular JavaScript library out there. And you
> know what? Over a year later, it's *still there*. At no point did it over
> drop out of that top spot. The number of people who would consider
> server-side programming suddenly feasible if PL/V8 were easy to do is orders
> of magnitude larger than the current PostgreSQL community.
Yeah -- javascript is making strides server-side with technologies
like node.js. Like you I have really mixed feelings about javascript
-- there's a lot of nastiness but the asynchronous style of coding
javascript developers tend to like is a great fit for postgres both
inside the backend and in database clients. This is on top of the
already nifty type system synergy I mentioned upthread.
Postgres would in fact make a wonderful 'nosql' backend with some
fancy json support -- document style transmission to/from the backend
without sacrificing relational integrity in storage. Properly done
this would be a fabulous public relations coup (PostgreSQL = better
nosql).
merlin
