Table Oriented Programming (2002)
I remember reading this essay when it first came out.  To try and reword it using modern terms:  <i>The author wishes that programming languages had database persistence capabilities as 1st-class built-in syntax instead of cumbersome bolted-on API functions.</i><p>Examples where database syntax (i.e. SQL syntax) is 1st-class without noisy syntax of function calls, without command strings in quotes, etc :<p>- business languages like COBOL<p>- programming languages in ERP systems like SAP ABAP, Oracle Financials<p>- stored procedural languages inside the RDBMS engine such as T-SQL in MS SQL Server, PL&#x2F;SQL in Oracle, sp in MySQL<p>In the above, the &quot;database&quot; is the world the programming language is working in.<p>The more general purpose programming languages like C++, Java, Javascript, Python  omit db manipulation as a core language feature.  This 2nd-class status requires 3rd-party libs, which means have extra ceremony syntax of #includes, imports, function calls with parentheses, etc.  Some try to reduce the cumbersome syntax friction with ORMs.  In contrast with something like SAP ABAP, the so-called &quot;ORM&quot; is already built in to process data tables without any friction.<p>The author works a lot on CRUD apps so a language that has inherent db syntax would enable &quot;Table-Oriented-Programming&quot;.<p>But we can also twist the author&#x27;s thesis around.  A programmer is coding in SAP ABAP or a stored-procedure in MySQL and wonders why raw memory access where contiguous blocks of RAM can be changed with pointers is not easy to code in those languages.  So an essay is written about advantages of &quot;pointer-oriented-programming&quot; because direct memory writes are really convenient for frame buffers in video games, etc.<p>In any case, I don&#x27;t see any trend where a general-purpose programming language will include DB SQL as 1st-class.  Even the recent languages like Rust and Zig don&#x27;t have basic SQLite3 db persistence as convenient built-in syntax.  If anyone proposed to add such db syntax, they would most likely reject it.