Blatant plug: My pain at all these unnecessary hieroglyphics & man page work is why I built Crab, so I could use SQL to find things and an EXEC command to run commands on them.
Interesting that that's the direction you went with this.
I've always wished that mysql supported a more unix-like interface, where a few characters of composable interfaces would do, instead of word after word of semi-natural-language syntax.
Wordiness isn't really a problem, because I'm a fast typer and most systems have tab completion and history recall.
For me the benefit is that for lots of problems, whether databases or the filesystem, thinking in terms of sets feels really natural. I can't imagine why you'd want to pipe grep results to grep -v rather than say "and not"
I guess we all prefer the language whose syntax we know the best.
I remember seeing Crab a while back on HN, and thinking I don't see why you would want this, but when you mentioned thinking in sets it was way more clear. It may be cause I don't use SQL often that I didn't click. Prehaps that would be a good thing to mention on the website.
I've always wished that mysql supported a more unix-like interface, where a few characters of composable interfaces would do, instead of word after word of semi-natural-language syntax.