Reading the quote in context: > Isn’t SQL a programming language? It is, but it’s declarative. You specify the outputs you want (i.e. which columns from your t

Reading the quote in context: > Isn’t SQL a programming language? It is, but it’s declarative. You specify the outputs you want (i.e. which columns from your table you want to pull), but not how those columns are actually returned to you. SQL abstracts a lot of what’s going on under the covers of a database. You want a procedural language, one where you have to specify how and where the data is selected from. Most modern languages are procedural: Java, Python, Scala, R, Go, etc. The author is trying to contrast fully Turing complete languages with a declarative domain specific language like SQL. (Yes, I know that some extensions provided by various database implementations make SQL Turing-complete.) Unfortunately, the word she chose to express this is already a term-of-art in the programming language world which means something different. Luckily, we're all charitable readers, so we can correct on the fly and understand what she meant.