[eluser]jmadsen[/eluser]
A fine answer.
I get a little heated on this subject, because I really do feel that in the web developer world today, there are a great many very good front-end people who are solid with php; will stay up nights and weekends to add ruby, python, haskel, whatever to their arsenal; use every minify/pixel reduction/rebuild the server with node.js/whatever trick to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of their site; and then happily write
Code:
$this->db->where('id', $id)->get('users')
against a 50 field users table so they can display "Hello, jmadsen" at the top of their page. And not know why it's bad, or care. And go teach all their friends to do it that way, because it's "clean and easy". Because for some reason, a lot of web developers don't seem to feel that sql is really a part of their job, or whatever.
It's nothing to do with AR or CodeIgniter. AR doesn't force you to make mistakes, but I think it lets you get away with too much and not have to go out and dig for better answers.
I would really like - and perhaps I'll suggest this somewhere, to see if others like the idea - is a separate area in the forums to deal with sql/data questions, so people can learn what is really going on behind their AR functions and how to write better sql code, with or without AR.
