- Turned down an offer from a software giant of the late 90s, to add database capabilities to one …

… - Turned down an offer from a software giant of the late 90s, to add database capabilities to one of their main languages, (basically bringing to their language what I had built at the OODB company). - Designed and built a Java ORM (late 90s). And after working on this stuff for something like 20 years, I concluded that it's all misguided. For all of its ugliness and weirdness, SQL was designed to address a certain set of requirements, and has succeeded wildly. New database programming languages face huge problems of acceptance, and needing to solve the exact same problems that SQL handles now. (This was easier 30 years ago since it was still early days for SQL. Now it's basically impossible.) ORMs are a terrible idea, in the "now you have two problems" category. Not only do you need to write high-performance queries, but you have to get your ORM to actually issue those queries. (Yes, ORMs have escapes to raw SQL. The existence of these escapes proves my point.) And schemas change, and the mapping to your language model has to change, and it's a mess. Just use SQL. …