[veltas]

I have a low opinion of it! And I'm not in a tiny minority there. There have been other query languages that seemed better to me, but SQL won. SQL's not nearly as wordy as COBOL though, if you want to calculate tax in SQL you're going to write a formula. I think there's a time and place for different styles of languages, for a general purpose (or even business-oriented) language I think it should have a relatively simple and succinct syntax. I just think a programming language that's more consistent and mechanical is easier for most people to grok, and I know a ton of programmers that like to tell everyone that they "sucked at maths, you don't need to be good at maths to program", the syntax didn't put them off.