SQL is declarative. There's no sense in which functional is higher-order than declarative. When you write map/reduce, you're doing a mix of functional and prob

SQL is declarative. There's no sense in which functional is higher-order than declarative. When you write map/reduce, you're doing a mix of functional and probably imperative down the line. Putting syntactic sugar aside, it's hard to beat SQL in tersity, because you're talking to a big query engine which can do JOIN/WHERE/GROUP BY/HAVING/etc.