[sethhovestol]

I actually work in a table oriented language, harbour, a child of clipper/xBase mentioned in the article. There are a few issues I've found with a table oriented architecture:

1. Managing state is a bit of a nightmare. Harbour is based off of DBF databases, which are essentially flat files of a 2d array, and keeps your record number within any given db. You can then query a field with the arrow operator (table->field) but you have no guarantee that any subfunction is not changing state.

2. DBMS lock in. Because you're operating is totally different paradigm moving dbs is actually rather challenging. Harbour has a really nice system of replaceable database drivers(rdd), but when your code is all written assuming movement in a flat file, switching to a SQL based system is challenging. I'm currently in the process of writing a rdd to switch us to postgres, but translating the logic of holding state to the paradigm of gathering data then operating on it in an established code base is quite a challenge.