[catnaroek]

> Joins and strong consistency are awesome but run head first into the CAP theorem and other concerns like single node performance on a sharded cluster.

The CAP theorem doesn't force you to give up consistency within a single node. NoSQL databases often do, though.

> All popular languages I've seen offer hierarchical (maps of maps etc.) and more primitive structures only.

So, instead of fixing programming languages, let's cripple databases?

[api]

I meant to suggest instead that we fix languages, and now that I think of it .net's linq is not bad.

[catnaroek]

LINQ makes querying somewhat more pleasant, but it doesn't fix the real problem: relations are inexpressible as first-class values (not the same thing as first-class objects!) in most object-oriented languages.