Imperative to Relational
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
madhadron.comTechstory
calmpositive
Debate
20/100
Programming ParadigmsData ModelingRelational Databases
Key topics
Programming Paradigms
Data Modeling
Relational Databases
The article discusses the evolution from imperative to relational programming, and the commenter extends this idea by suggesting the inclusion of other data abstractions like spreadsheets, matrices, and graphs.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Light discussionFirst comment
41m
Peak period
1
0-1h
Avg / period
1
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Nov 9, 2025 at 7:50 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 9, 2025 at 8:32 AM EST
41m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
1 comments in 0-1h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 9, 2025 at 8:32 AM EST
about 2 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
ID: 45865196Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 5:58:08 AM
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
D4M can caters to most modern data abstractions including spreadsheets, database tables, matrices, and graphs based on associative arrays [2].
>For software engineers, databases are one of the biggest power tools available to us, up there with compilers and full featured operating systems.
D4M team even proposed a new and elegant associative array based operating system namely TabulaROSA that probably can settle the monolithic vs micro kernel debates by Torvalds and Tanenbaum for good [3].
That left us with a powerful programming language to go with them. As a comprehensive programming toolkit nothing come even close to D language in term expressiveness with its Compile Time Function Evaluation (CTFE) features among others that Zig and C++20 are blatantly copying [4].
[1] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:
https://d4m.mit.edu/
[2] Associative Arrays: Unified Mathematics for Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.05709
[3] TabulaROSA: Tabular Operating System Architecture for Massively Parallel Heterogeneous Compute Engines:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.05308
[4] D language features:
https://dlang.org/comparison.html