I think explicit languages can make things more clear however disagree with the notion that implicit behaviors are necessarily a bad thing. I've found that the

I think explicit languages can make things more clear however disagree with the notion that implicit behaviors are necessarily a bad thing. I've found that the hybrid approach in the MongoDB aggregation framework works really well. It optimizes things around the first $match to create an optimized initial read (the selectivity of your initial stages is really important). Once you're past the initial read the rest of the pipeline is fully imperative. This makes things really nice when debugging complex aggregation pipelines. For example, you can simply omit the rest of your pipeline at any point to debug (with a $limit), see what you're dealing with, fix them, and move on to the next one.