[batista]

No, actually the only reason is "its not a language programmers want to use".

It is very much non shitty.

Its just that lots of programmers, especially OO minded cannot get into its mindset, and use it for what it is, they have to put a lame OO abstraction on top.

Functional programmers shoud fare better in this regard (or Prolog programmers, if they still exist).

If you really want to abstract it, something like LINQ is a better way.

[jmathai]

I agree. I see SQL similarly to regular expressions. There's a handful of commands which let you do a lot of stuff.

The hard part in SQL is optimization which requires really understanding how the underlying database engine optimizes and executes the query.

Optimizing complex queries is no joke. It's one of the reasons noSQL seems nice at glance. You can do the optimizations by adding lots of indexes or using application logic. In reality, it's a tradeoff for other problems.