[samatman]

I have a better comparison.

It is as though we lived in a world where, like our own, Lisp invented garbage collection. But unlike our own world, in 2022, Lisp is the only garbage collected language anyone uses. Others were invented but that mostly stopped by the 80s.

Many people would like to replace Lisp, and keep in mind this is Lisp so lexical scope is only available in some implementations and people who want cross-platform compatibility don't use it. But without it, you have to manage your own memory.

That's SQL and relational databases. Relational databases with ACID guarantees aren't optional, they aren't a nice-to-have, they're foundational.

And we talk to them in SQL because... we talk to them in SQL.