[miohtama]

I have been working in this industry for 30 years now. SQL is one of the most ugliest programming language I have ever working with. Like Perl, it's write once, hope you never need to read, language.

SQL was created in 60s. It has not really kept up with the pace of modern programming language ergonomics. It was made for a single person executing a batch job query pulling data from the database.

On the other hand, I kind of agree SQL is good to learn. It's an counter example on how not to design a programming language.

[tomnipotent]

> SQL was created in 60s

The IBM System R and SEQUEL paper was 1974, while Oracle 2 was the first commercial database which added it in 1979.

[HideousKojima]

There are preprocessors like PRQL that help with some (far from all) of the pain points of SQL as a language

[miohtama]

Hopefully we get over the fact that we still need to transpile something to the ugly SQL and databases themselves start to speak a better language.

Despite all the hate MongoDb deserves, it solved the problem how application developers can easily get data in and out of a database.

[munk-a]

There are certainly valid syntatical criticisms you can have of SQL[1] but on the whole SQL is expressive and rather concise while being solid enough to remain the default expression language of choice for fifty years.

1. The order of the phrases, the lack of trailing commas, the fact that an awful organization controls the standards and gatekeeps them to a bizarre extent.

[ako]

Seriously? I just had a Quick Look at the mongodb docs, but when I see that I’m glad to use SQL. All the brackets and dollar prefixed expressions make mongodb queries hard to read.

[freilanzer]

Agreed, it's limited, ugly, and I'd rather use something else. Everytime I have to use it it's cumbersome.