Lukas Eder discusses one benefit to a declarative language like SQL:
It’s simple. Both the set-builder notation, and the SQL language (and in principle, other languages’ for comprehensions) are declarative. They are expressions, which can be composed to other, more complex expressions, without necessarily executing them.
Remember the imperative approach? We tell the machine exactly what to do:
- Start counting from this particular minimal integer value
- Stop counting at this particular maximal integer value
- Store all even integers in between in this particular intermediate collection
What if we don’t actually need negative integers? What if we just wanted to have a utility that calculates even integers and then reuse that to list all positive integers? Or, all positive integers less than 100? Etc.
It may be my innate contrarian curmudgeonliness, but I am moving more and more toward the idea that the easiest way to deal with data is a combination of SQL and functional programming languages, leaving OO out of the picture.