[koningrobot]

Mine too. My main gripe with object graphs is that often you need to make arbitrary decisions about what comes "first" -- should I represent my customers as a list of `(name, address)` records or a record `(names, addresses)` of lists? This is a silly decision to have to make, and an even sillier one to have to deal with when later you need to transpose the structure to more naturally fit some other task. Relational tables sidestep this issue.

Over the years I've found that these transposition problems are a huge drag on programs, and once you recognize them you start seeing them all over the place. They make simple and obvious relational tasks into dozens of lines of nested data structure traversal and manipulation.

The notion of transposition comes from the array programming world, where a multi-dimensional array/tensor can be seen as a tree structure, whose levels may be easily reordered by transposition. I sometimes use numpy arrays for general-purpose programming; it can be very powerful with a well-chosen representation. Unfortunately array concepts basically require the data to be rectangular -- `x[i]` has the same shape as `x[j]` -- which can be hard to adapt to general problems.

My dream then is a general-purpose data structure that takes the best of both the relational and array-programming worlds: the freedom and flatness of relational tables, enriched with tacit ideas like broadcasting that make array programming so ergonomic.