Yeah, I've heard the praise. I tried to rally Gergo into porting the idea to GHC. (Using the new pluggable constraint solvers in GHC seems like the best bet.)

I still remember when I hadn't had any clue about functional programming, and I was moving from stuff like QBasic and C to Python. I thought dicts were awesome. And they are---by comparison to only having arrays.

Relations do everything dicts do, but you don't have to decide on the structure beforehand. Exactly the same argument that Codd had.