[doctor_eval]

TIOBE [0] reckons that the top 10 programming languages are currently Python, C, Java, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, "Assembly Language", SQL and PHP. The first five languages represent more than 50% of the users in TIOBE.

Apart from SQL, all of these languages are imperative, and most of them derive from C in some shape or form; K&R C was published in 1978, 44 years ago.

So, while I'd agree that there have certainly been huge incremental improvements in imperative programming in the last ~50 years, when we look at what people use on a daily basis, it's not really clear to me that the changes have been any greater in significance than the changes that SQL has gone through during the same period.

[0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

[wruza]

Yet every one of these “ancient” languages allows you to have human-readable common expressions, functions, sorts of classes, identifier scoping, heavy code reuse, flow parametrization, higher order operations (even C with some effort), libraries, frameworks, package management, interoperability, to name a few.

SQL is really good at its in-place one-time this-specific-case relational querying.

Things SQL is not even mediocre at: programming.