Programming language generations may be relevant here if you are interested. Prolog for example can be called a 5th generation PL, which means that you state wh

Programming language generations may be relevant here if you are interested. Prolog for example can be called a 5th generation PL, which means that you state what you want instead of how you want it achieved. Wikipedia lists SQL at the 4th gen, though I think the former is just as true for SQL as well - you only state that you want this and that row/field, and the actual algorithm is up to the query optimizer.