Indeed we're doing fewer new features (and haven't posted to the posts page in a long time, as you noticed).
But it's still maintained, folks are still using it, if anyone finds bugs in simple-to-moderate queries then we'll fix them.
LLMs probably took a bit of the wind out of our sails for making this "the new standard". But I still think it's a really nice language and interface; if the world changed again such that it became more widely useful, I'd jump to spending lots of time on it again.
Thank you for building and maintaining PRQL! I'm surprised to hear that growth stalled due to LLMs.
I just found out about PRQL yesterday! I was looking for a query language that is more token efficient and easier to reason about for LLMs than SQL.
PRQL looks amazing for data analytics agents. Our first few test are quite promising.
I also really appreciate the python bindings. We don't give our agent direct access to the database, we only provide the schema information. The python api makes it super easy to convert a query into an AST, which lets us do some basic offline validation of table names, etc.
I'm sad to hear that about LLMs. I sometimes wonder if the software world is going to be "locked into" our existing languages, because it's what the LLMs can work with.
But also maybe that will change — LLMs can learn new languages faster than people, and can _write_ new languages much faster than people. So wide confidence bounds for the future!
Matching SQL in features is very hard, especially if you also want to make it more sane and more powerful at the same time while also wanting to be able the generate valid SQL from your syntax. So I am not surprised that it stalled out.
Sure, but they never intended to support everything you can do in SQL. For example, they say on the Roadmap page that they're only going to support SELECTs -- there won't be a PRQL way to do an INSERT, UPDATE, etc.
When it comes to SQL it's the select that's by far the majority of the work though, the hard work with mutating operations is on the database implementation, not really the syntax or query plan
Indeed we're doing fewer new features (and haven't posted to the posts page in a long time, as you noticed).
But it's still maintained, folks are still using it, if anyone finds bugs in simple-to-moderate queries then we'll fix them.
LLMs probably took a bit of the wind out of our sails for making this "the new standard". But I still think it's a really nice language and interface; if the world changed again such that it became more widely useful, I'd jump to spending lots of time on it again.