I don't know. Procedural and declarative languages can both query and manipulate data. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but that's not my intent. For all of SQL's war

I don't know. Procedural and declarative languages can both query and manipulate data. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but that's not my intent. For all of SQL's warts, it is the golden standard, and I agree with most everything else you say (it's succinct, easy to get optimal behavior, etc.) but compared to what you can express with Spark in Scala, it's not the end-all-be-all of expressivity. In fact, several SQL-compatible query engines have extended SQL to allow you to do work around its limitations and manually hint at what you want the engine to do. And even then, there are tons of situations where you fight the engine to do what you want. If I had a nickle for every Data Scientist or Finance person I unblocked because what ends up being a recursive join was making their query run time infinite...