[james_woods]

SQL was not made for programmers alone. It has been invented also for not so technical people so that verboseness and overhead is part of the deal.

>When Ray and I were designing Sequel in 1974, we thought that the predominant use of the language would be for ad-hoc queries by planners and other professionals whose domain of expertise was not primarily data- base management. We wanted the language to be simple enough that ordinary people could ‘‘walk up and use it’’ with a minimum of training.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6359709

[zabzonk]

> We wanted the language to be simple enough that ordinary people could ‘‘walk up and use it’’ with a minimum of training.

In that case it has been an abject failure. I have been using SQL since the mid 1980s (so pretty much since the start of its widespread adoption) and I have never met "ordinary people" (by which I assume intelligent business-oriented professionals) who could (or wanted to) cope with it.

I like it, but the idea of sets does not come naturally to most people (me included). But I once worked with a programmer who had never been exposed to SQL - I leant him an introductory book on it and he came in the next day and said "Oh, of course, it's all sets, isn't it?" and then went on to write some of the most fiendish queries I have ever seen.

[papito]

I don't think this is disputed that the original goal of SQL was a flop. The designers grossly underestimated the technical chops of a layman. However, I would argue that us tech people did benefit from that original goal of simplicity. I mean, SELECT first, last FROM employees WHERE id = 10 is not too bad at all. Kind of elegant, no?

If SQL was designed "by engineers for engineers", you would be using esoteric Git commands just to blow off steam.

[hvocode]

This is very important. I personally like old technologies and languages where the designers considered users who had limited technical skills, and most importantly, assumed that those users had no interest or need to improve their technical skills. Removing the assumption that users are willing to increase their technical sophistication forces a designer to think more about what they're designing. Looking at older languages is interesting - for all their warts, they do feel more intentional in their design than modern things that have a clear developer-centric mindset baked in.

[rswail]

It's similar to the discussions around COBOL back in the day. What's interesting is that the primary "end user" language is Excel formulas. Who would have thought a declaratory relational language with matrices would "win" that battle.

Any arguments that "users will write their own" languages are basically flawed. Users want results, if there's no alternative, they'll do it themselves, in the simplest, but probably most inefficient way possible.

[sam_lowry_]

This is a recurring theme. I was once amazed to learn that ClearCase was made for lawyers to use. The name makes suddenly a lot of sense!