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Malloy: An Experimental Language for Data (github.com/looker-open-source)
4 points by carlineng on Oct 20, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



A project from the creators of Looker. From the docs [1]:

> Malloy was designed by a team of people with a lot of experience in understanding the task of extracting meaning from data. Years of constant exposure to SQL resulted in a tremendous sense of wonder at the power of SQL ... and a tremendous source of frustration at how bad SQL is at representing the types of operations needed to get meaningful data out of relational databases, and how difficult it is to maintain and extend a complex set of transformations written in SQL.

> Malloy started as a "clean slate" thought experiment, if we knew all the things we know about data, and about programming with data, and about programming languages in general, and we were designing a query language today, what would it look like.

> In it's earliest form, Malloy looked a lot like SQL, and much of Malloy continues to be influenced by the overall design of the SQL language. It was always the intention that there could be a document that would contain both Malloy and SQL and those would make sense together, perhaps parallel to the way Javascript and Typescript work together.

This statement resonates a lot with me. The VSCode plugin already looks fairly built out, and there's a native BigQuery integration.

[1]: https://looker-open-source.github.io/malloy/documentation/la...




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