Joel talks about the fact that the major modern languages have ignored the fact that data access has become one of the most (if not the most) common jobs that programmers have to tackle. He says:

It's about time that a language designer admitted that RDBMS access is intrinsic to modern application implementation and supported it in a first-class way syntactically.

So let me be the first to admit it: RDBMS access is intrinsic to modern application implementation. It's the second part of Joel's statement - the supporting it part - that's the hard part, though. Makes me think of the Mark Twain quote, "Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it."

I think Erik Meijer and the Xen guys have a lot of interesting ideas, though...