In the end, the former view prevailed and the last 30 years is
a testament to the value of relational database systems. Programs
in high-level languages, such as SQL, are easier to write, easier
to modify, and easier for a new person to understand. Codasyl
was criticized for being “the assembly language of DBMS access”.
We argue that MR programming is somewhat analogous to Codasyl
programming: one is forced to write algorithms in a low-level language in order to perform record-level manipulation. On the other
hand, to many people brought up programming in procedural languages, such as C/C++ or Java, describing tasks in a declarative
language like SQL can be challenging.