He has done a lot of work using datalog and argues, convincingly in my opinion, that it is reasonable that some of the elements of datalog-like programming will be part of the future. For example, that there is a very simple way to express a relational-join and the underlying machinery figures out the most efficient way to do it, just like a DB query optimizer does.
If you agree, check out the HYTRADBOI (have you tried rubbing a database on it) conference happening later today: https://www.hytradboi.com/
This is a meeting of people who agree or at least are willing to explore that datalog and related systems are the way forward. Lots of interesting programming systems will be presented!
Datalog is one of my favorite languages, specially the Soufflé implementation with static types. Just as mainstream languages started adding OO-related and later FP-related features, I hope logic-programming / relational-programming is next in line, and Datalog is (IMO) by far the best implementation of the paradigm. It's super simple to understand, it pushes you towards good modeling practices by design, it's highly efficient, the only downside is weak language integration / lack of popularity...
Yeah, but in my experience, DB query optimizers are terrible. Ideally you'd be able to write "select * from A, B, C where A.col1 = B.col2 and B.col3 = C.col4", but in practice, you have to hold the SQL interpreter's hand by using inner joins and carefully choosing which table to start with and what order to join them, in effect doing the query optimizer's work for it.
He has done a lot of work using datalog and argues, convincingly in my opinion, that it is reasonable that some of the elements of datalog-like programming will be part of the future. For example, that there is a very simple way to express a relational-join and the underlying machinery figures out the most efficient way to do it, just like a DB query optimizer does.