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its details remain acceptably declarative
Wednesday, September 15 2021
I hadn't managed to get done what I needed to get done last night for my day job, so I got up early this morning and continued, trying to make sense of the baroque uncommented C# code written by the Ukranians to migrate contacts. My boss Alex had given me three scenarios of migration to implement, and I was trying to insinuate code for one of them into the workflow. But it kept not working, sometimes by throwing stack overflows for reasons that the code made difficult to debug. Eventually it became clear that I wasn't going to have the time to figure out the C# mess and that I'd have to implement my migration further downstream using SQL. Fortunately, I'm adept at writing data transformations in Microsoft SQL, and in the space of about four hours I wrote about 150 lines of SQL Server code (the kind with loops, variables, string parsing, and conditions) that only required some light debugging afterwards. SQL Server's SQL-based programming language is something of a relic, seemingly designed to encourage cut-and-paste repetition and other coding sins. For example, while there are procedures and functions available, they're typically created elsewhere from the script that one is writing, which tends to lead to functions and procedures getting separated from the script that calls them, which then makes me, the programmer, avoid them for one-off tasks. But I love how straightforward and imperative it is even as its details remain acceptably declarative.
This evening a thunderstorm blew through while I was in the bathtub. Gretchen got back from work at around that time and made a weird pasta dish involving edamame beans that was surprisingly good. In the episode of Jeopardy! that we watched as we ate, for the first time in a couple weeks, tiresome long-time champion Matt Amodio went into Final Jeopardy without it being a run-away. But then he was the only one who got the right answer (Jaws), so he won anyway.
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