Scaling Financial Reporting at Airbnb
"Going from imperative programming to functional programming has been a powerful paradigm shift for us to think about financial processing and accounting. We can now think of this system as a straightforward actor/handler system rather than getting mired in complicated SQL-join logic."Though whether SQL is a functional language (or a programming language at all, if you're talking ANSI SQL) is a subtle question, I would at the very least not describe it as a traditional imperative programming language.  I think this is an important distinction for the article because, contrary to what this article suggests, I've found SQL to be quite helpful for understanding functional and declarative programming concepts.  That said, it might be a lot easier to express the types of tasks in the article as straight-forward functions rather than getting wrapped up in all this set-based talk in SQL.