The Future of Pyrseas: Part 3

The second Andromeda feature, aside from schema version control, that Pyrseas wanted to rescue was the automatic generation of search and detailed editing screens.

It is somewhat amazing that 40 years after Moshé Zloof’s “Query by Example” and over 30 years after “A Forms Application Development System” by Prof. Larry Rowe and Kurt Shoens, most applications for searching, entering and maintaining data are still reinventing the wheel.

There are of course apps such as PgAdmin and Adminer that can be used for general querying and editing, but their target audience is developers and DBAs, not end users. Furthermore, these tools typically only allow querying a single table at a time (see QBE queries #3 and subsequent, in the aforementioned paper, for examples that usually can’t be handled).

At first, I thought I would develop a typical Python WSGI application. I planned to use Werkzeug because the extra machinery in larger frameworks such as Django is unnecessary for the envisioned purpose. An additional consideration was that a smaller library or framework would make it easier for anyone wanting to extend the automatically generated pieces into a full-fledged app.

I started designing a prototype application and also exploring other WSGI contenders. Then Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Tarek Ziadé jolted my thought process: a JavaScript-based framework was the way forward for a web-based app with Python (and Werkzeug) relegated to a REST API server.

So I took a look at AngularJS, Ember.js, Backbone.js and several other JavaScript frameworks and libraries. At this time, it seems a simpler library such as Backbone.js, or perhaps the Marionette framework, may be more appropriate. It is comforting to see that PgAdmin4 has chosen a similar path for its web-deployed client.

This capability is ultimately quite ambitious, so perhaps Pyrseas ought to stick just to schema version control. Nevertheless, whether integrated with Pyrseas or not, this functionality ought to re-use the database-catalog-to-Python-structures-to-YAML (and vice versa) features developed for Pyrseas.

This concludes this three-part series. Please also see part 1 and part 2.

Most Liked and Disliked Programming Languages

Vasudev Ram pointed readers to a Hacker News poll on the subject. While the raw numbers per language are interesting, I think the percentages of Like and Dislike vs. the total votes cast for a given language are perhaps a better metric.

Thus the five most liked languages based on raw votes were:

1. Python
2. C
3. JavaScript
4. Ruby
5. SQL

And the five most disliked languages were:

1. PHP
2. Java
3. C++
4. JavaScript
5. Visual Basic

It’s rather interesting that JavaScript is on both lists (and I’m quite surprised that SQL had so many votes).  I haven’t included the actual numbers since the poll is still active.

Ranking the languages by number of Like votes as percentage of total votes for that language gives a perhaps more realistic picture:

C	88%
Python	86%
Scheme	84%
Lua	84%
Lisp *	81%
Haskell	80%
Rust	79%
Clojure	78%
Erlang	76%
Go	75%

(*) Dimitri Fontaine will appreciate this.

I believe those rankings will be more stable than the raw votes. Oh, and SQL ranks about 14 according to these percentages.

For completeness, here are the five most disliked languages based on ratio of Dislike votes to total votes for the language:

Cobol	94%
ColdFusion	94%
Visual Basic	89%
Actionscript	83%
PHP	76%

As they say, YMMV.

A short detour into AngularJS and Brunch

I was planning to continue exploring database user interfaces using something completely different, as mentioned in the last post. However, I’ve taken a short detour to experiment further with the technologies in question.

In case you’re interested in AngularJS, the Karma test runner, the Brunch application assembler, CoffeeScript and the Jade templating engine, you can follow along at GitHub where I’ve created angular-phonecat-brunch, a derivative of the AngularJS phone catalog tutorial. And if you’re an expert on these topics, you can visit too, and let me know how to do it better!

Update: The tutorial has been completed, including changes to use the latest releases of Bower and Brunch, and also incorporates Stylus dynamic CSS stylesheets. Don’t miss the documentation README.