I'd love to see a language with first class relational data types. This would basically be Turing-complete SQL with better syntax and obviously with a very modern language outside the relational stuff. Bonus points for providing hooks to allow transparent persistence of data, making the program and its database potentially the same thing and allowing easy persistent state programs with complex data.

This could theoretically be added to other languages with libraries (with varying elegance depending on the language), but a real first class language would be carefully designed so that everything is serializable and deserializable with excellent performance. Things that fundamentally are state like network connections would also have to be carefully handled in some way where their essence was persisted such that the program could restore them and rebuild their state.

This would pretty much give you an ORM without the impedance mismatch and would eliminate a TON of "CRUD" code and boilerplate.

It's defunct now, but it was indeed a Turing-complete SQL (but actually relational) with Prolog-like syntax and set semantics. We supported persisting data, and indeed you could think of it as programming within a database. Even though it's not worked on anymore, the last version in the repo worked pretty well IMO. I built a Spotify clone, and even a robot in the language. If you're interested in these ideas, you should give it a shot! Hopefully someone will pick up these ideas and run with them even further.

It's a pretty mind-bending experience to program this way, and I promise you'll have a new perspective on programming as a practice once you grok it (that was common feedback from our users).