"subroutines predate goto statements by about ten years;" In academia, perhaps. Subroutines were 'expensive' in the real world for a long time. Many things we

"subroutines predate goto statements by about ten years;" In academia, perhaps. Subroutines were 'expensive' in the real world for a long time. Many things we take for granted today are too expensive when 16KB is a lot of RAM. I was referring to common practice rather than academia. "the whole array construct in postgres seems like it was probably a huge mistake" In a cousin comment where I talk about how we might do things differently if we were starting from scratch, this is one of the biggest things I had in mind. As a column type it's plausible enough, as a generic sequence type you can wrap around any other type. Seems a basic enough primitive that we should have it around. But probably everywhere else I'm using it, I really want a more native "table" type. But I can't really have that. I can kind of see it forming, I think, as the versions march on. But at least as of the version I've been using lately, it's not quite here yet. In general SQL struggles with type recursion. While it's not hard to see why from a performance perspective you want an engine that doesn't have to deal with arbitrarily-sized values, it gets more and more limiting every year. I've gotten a distressing amount of mileage out of using the JSON types the major engines have been forced to incorporate to stay competitive just as "Look, I just need a little tree here... I can promise it'll stay bounded in size, but I don't want to encode that as a crapton of rows" or "hey, honestly, I've got a modestly complicated structure here that my clients will decode and breaking it out the Official SQL Way is just crazy". This is the thing that really gives me that 1970s Tech feel when I'm working with SQL, and while I appreciate the slow and steady lifting of the restrictions I would definitely like to use a tech that lifted them in a thoughtful, principled manner instead of a multi-decade drunkard's walk across the design landscape.