[getmeinrn]

>declarative

An admirable ideal, but declarative languages always seem to devolve towards some frankenstein imperative/declarative hybrid. We need to stop going down this path and embrace Pulumi's pattern: use existing general purpose imperative languages to generate a declarative structure. Instead, people try to take their not-mature declarative language and fit a weird general purpose language inside it.

EDIT>> I'm not suggesting that SQL needs to be declarative, only that if a problem space would benefit from declarative structures, generate them imperatively instead.

[codethief]

I've silently been a big fan of this approach for years but hadn't heard about it anywhere (most likely because I'm not familiar with Pulumi).

Could you provide a reference that elaborates on "Pulumi's pattern"?

[getmeinrn]

This is the closest example I could find https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/how-pulumi-works/

Pulumi serves as the strongest contender to Terraform when doing IaC (infrastructure as code). Terraform attempts to be a declarative markup language (HCL) but it has a lot of weird imperative quirks due to (understandably) trying to support common complex use cases. In the end they have a clunky custom language that tries to do what general programming languages have done well forever. Pulumi doesn't re-invent the wheel, and lets programming languages do what they do best. Pulumi only really cares that the programming language generates a declarative spec that can be used to compare with your infrastructure. It's the best of both worlds.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

PRQL seems the most realistic evolution out of SQL. Changing the programming paradigm will never convince the SQL true believers.

[getmeinrn]

I don't really know what you're saying, can you say it another way? "Most realistic evolution"... why is that needed? If the problem is different database engines implementing the SQL spec differently, that's not something that can be papered over with another abstraction without a lot of wrinkles.