I believe that many of the ideas from functional programming are very suitable for a query language. To make a case for it, I’ll briefly explain a few features, adapt their syntax, and show how they are used in PRQL. Fancy functional features Functional programming is an old-school programming paradigm that is gradually gaining traction within a few common languages that are designed with procedural paradigm in mind. The many aspects of the paradigm have been discussed extensively, so I’ll try to be brief.