[masklinn]

> It may be impossible to create a less pleasant language than SQL.

It’s not by the way, there’s an entire segment of the esolang space for which it’s the goal (starting with the canonical example that is INTERCAL).

But ignoring esolangs, there are lots of very unpleasant programming languages out there. M/MUMPS is a well known one (especially with “legacy” coding styles, or so I gather). I also consider XSLT to be abhorrent, especially given the nice underlying conceptual idea (not entirely dissimilar to SQL really, just worse).

About SQL, an idea I saw surface recently in a related discussion was how nice it’d be if databases could expose the data model interaction and allow building on that directly: most every SQL database compiles the query into some sort of bytecode (combining direct translation and planner information) to actually run it on its storage layer, some databases allow peeking at the bytecode (sqlite actually prints the bytecode as part of its EXPLAIN output) but I don’t know that any allows bytecode input.

TBF the bytecode is very much considered an internal detail, it can change a lot between versions and (most importantly) tends to be more or less completely unchecked, it relies on the compiler generating it being correct (not unlike cpython for instance).

[BeFlatXIII]

MUMPS always reminds me of Perl code golfing.