In general, I find that compilers, transpilers, etc. are all just "interpreters", which conceptually just boil down to a given input being "re-interpreted" into a new representation. Thus, what we commonly call interpreters re-interpret programs into results, compilers just re-interpret into an executable, transpilers into a different language, etc.
Imho this is a non-issue. Python's max-function isn't limited to numerical values, but can consume iterables of anything with a defined order, i.e., things that implement the appropriate hooks in the Python data model. For such inputs, returning anything but an error (or the optionally provided default value) doesn't make much sense.
Sometimes this may be the case but not so much here. Firstly the mention the version they used and, secondly, OtterTune are a startup based around automatic DB steup/schema optimization founded by folks from CMUs DB group, they most certainly know what they are talking about here.
This is not strictly true. Python expressions are in fact Turing complete. For example, you can implement an entire Brainfuck interpreter [0] in a single expression.
It may be "close[r] to the data", but be ware Python UDFs usually still have context switches between the python interpreter and the query executor. If these pile up — as is the case if you fire off queries in, say, a loop — you will still see lousy performance. There is currently research under way, to optimize UDFs and other forms of computations over database resident data. For Python, for example, you can checkout the python to SQL compiler [0] and associated demo-paper [1] we produced for this years Sigmod. (Disclaimer: as you may have noticed thanks to that " we", I'm an author on that paper.) Though it may only support a limited subset of Python, one can already do alot with just that.
Not to nitpick, but do you mean the pattern matching statement when you are talking about "sum types"? Because as far as I'm aware Python doesn't have " proper" algebraic data types.
You're right, it doesn't, and they're still quite awwkward. And I'm not even talking about pattern matching; just the fact that you can finally define a class as `X = Y | Z`.
