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teleforcelast Monday at 7:29 AM5 repliesview on HN

>The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion

As a modern array language D4M is the natural successor for SQL [1].

D4M is based on mathematics like SQL, specifically associative array algebra but not relational unlike SQL. It's more generic since can it caters to most modern data abstractions including spreadsheets, database tables, matrices, and graphs [2].

You can achieve 100M database inserts per second with D4M and Accumulo more than a decade ago back in 2014 [3].

[1] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:

https://d4m.mit.edu/

[2] Mathematics of Big Data: Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs:

https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5691/Mathematics-of-B...

[3] Achieving 100M database inserts per second using Apache Accumulo and D4M (2017 - 46 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465141


Replies

molftoday at 8:14 AM

There is no SQL successor: SQL is here to stay.

Applying the Lindy effect [1]: after half a century of SQL we can expect it to survive for at least as long.

Disruption/displacement of SQL is like attempting to replace email. It's not going to happen. At best an alternative technology can carve out a small niche (and there's nothing wrong with that).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

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red_admiraltoday at 8:25 AM

The only one? As opposed to ... Haskell, LISP/Scheme in the original SICP version, and proof assistant languages like Lean.

democracytoday at 8:22 AM

The power of SQL is not because it is "based on mathematics" - it's because anyone (really, anyone, even with the most basic English skills) could understand it quickly enough to start using it productively with not much technical knowledge. Business analytics, managers of all sorts, manual QA people could grasp the basics in a minute and more complex queries within a few hours. It is very user-friendly and such tools win over anything else. Each time I see an overengineerd/overcomplicated solution that is hard to read/understand - I know it's only "good luck" to the creators.

ndsipa_pomutoday at 8:04 AM

Sounds interesting, but how can I use it to talk with an Oracle/MySQL/PostgreSQL database?

l1ng0today at 7:57 AM

I feel you missed the point of the article :)

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