On 13 May 2006, at 14:27, Jeremy Epstein wrote:
Hence, the challenge is to make Drupal more powerful _AND_ easier to develop for. This requires that we question certain development directions and look at them through the eyes of amateurs.
IMO, learning the DDL specifics of two different database systems is more of a barrier for new developers, than learning a simple abstraction layer ever could be. I can't speak for all developers, but personally, I've always been much more familiar with MySQL, and I've been scared and uneducated about the details of pgSQL for quite some time. I've been developing with Drupal for over a year, but only recently have I taken the time to dig a little deeper (just a little) into pgSQL - just enough to make my modules compatible with it.
The fact you didn't dig deeper into PostgreSQL until now, illustrates my point. People new to Drupal want to write code that works. They are just scratching their own itch. They want to tweak or extend Drupal, and they want it to be super easy to do. Getting the job done, and done quickly while still feeling good about it, is what sucks them into Drupal. Portability is not a major concern until they are fully sucked into Drupal development. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/