From an article about Microsoft's new D language:

"Today’s developer world is insanely object-oriented,” Lucco said. “Every last piece of data is encapsulated in an object that is a Turing machine, so you have no way to analyze what’s going on with it. Then that’s in stark contrast with the SQL world, where there’s a ton of things you can do with your data, and, over time, different programs can hit the same data and get something out of it. So we were like, ‘Well, how can we make mainstream programming more like SQL programming, without making it harder, like SQL programming is often considered to be?

This is a pretty interesting observation. I still wonder if the issue couldn't be resolved neatly within the OO paradigm by defining "query" interfaces on objects, perhaps not unlike the interface ORMs present. Of course, in another part of the article, he also mentions that D borrows Lisp's "code as data" paradigm, so there may be more to it than meets the eye, assuming he's using the word "data" to mean the same thing in both contexts.

Of course, at some level, it sounds sort of like this might all add up to introspection/reflection, something that's already been pioneered elsewhere.