[halfcat]

> If you understand the operators

That’s the point. In an imperative language if you don’t yet understand (or make a typo, or whatever), you can just print/console.log and find out.

I’ve seen junior devs, data analysts, and LLMs spin their wheels trying to figure out why adding a join isn’t producing the output they want. I don’t think they would figure it out using SQL alone if you gave them a month.

[SkiFire13]

The equivalent of `print`/`console.log` in SQL would be using subqueries/CTE and run them to see the intermediate result (just like `print`/`console.log` show you intermediate results of the executions in an imperative language).

[sgarland]

Then you back off, and go back to first principles. Create the minimum example of the problem, and as a sibling comment mentioned, break it down to its constituent parts and observe what happens in each.