because as a language it's quite complicated, except in simple cases, the syntax is completely arbitrary and randomly injects keywords willy-nilly in an absurd attempt at being "english-readable"
because it lacks composability, making dynamic query generation a massive pain in the ass, as well as manual edits of queries.
because watching DBA's flailing strings about, smashing them together like apes with stones, just so they can struggle to feed it into an EXEC SQL call is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of our programmatic times.
because it's not at all portable, with every database arbitrarily extending the SQL standard left-and-right, and even basic conveniences and functions end up breaking your portability goals; the ANSI SQL standard defines less a standard and more of an aesthetic mold for each dialect to try to match against.
because it lacks any portable ability to extend the language, with nearly every function added not as a stdlib function but instead as part of the language itself, often with custom keywords to go with it; there's a reason you find imports for anything in python, and next to nothing for rdbms's. Nearly any extension/package implemented is hooked into the DB internals, and not portable.
because the editor tooling is basically stuck in the 80's, with universally useless error messages, absurd limitations like select-clause ordering requirements (e.g. you can't use a select alias in the where clause, because the where clause gets evaluated first; this is exactly equivalent to C requiring forward declarations), select-before-from breaking autocomplete, and only advanced editors bother to even forward data-type mapping from schema definitions to your autocomplete because of the open-world assumption (the schema could change under your feet); hell, even SQL formatters have largely given up on trying to format anything but the most rudimentary constructs, because of the ridiculous amount of language they need to support.
because the language stuffs a trinary logic (true,false,null) into a binary logic system and grants you access to all of the benefits of both false positive results and false negatives.
because the relational algebra is elegant, in all the ways the SQL language is not.
But we'll stay with it, because at the end of the day, no one gives a shit about SQL. The SQL language is just the interface to the Glory of Codd, the relational algebra, the RDBMS, and in this we find all true value. But we can still dream of a better world. A world where RDBMS's support more than one query language.
Comments
because as a language it's quite complicated, except in simple cases, the syntax is completely arbitrary and randomly injects keywords willy-nilly in an absurd attempt at being "english-readable"
because it lacks composability, making dynamic query generation a massive pain in the ass, as well as manual edits of queries.
because watching DBA's flailing strings about, smashing them together like apes with stones, just so they can struggle to feed it into an EXEC SQL call is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of our programmatic times.
because it's not at all portable, with every database arbitrarily extending the SQL standard left-and-right, and even basic conveniences and functions end up breaking your portability goals; the ANSI SQL standard defines less a standard and more of an aesthetic mold for each dialect to try to match against.
because it lacks any portable ability to extend the language, with nearly every function added not as a stdlib function but instead as part of the language itself, often with custom keywords to go with it; there's a reason you find imports for anything in python, and next to nothing for rdbms's. Nearly any extension/package implemented is hooked into the DB internals, and not portable.
because the editor tooling is basically stuck in the 80's, with universally useless error messages, absurd limitations like select-clause ordering requirements (e.g. you can't use a select alias in the where clause, because the where clause gets evaluated first; this is exactly equivalent to C requiring forward declarations), select-before-from breaking autocomplete, and only advanced editors bother to even forward data-type mapping from schema definitions to your autocomplete because of the open-world assumption (the schema could change under your feet); hell, even SQL formatters have largely given up on trying to format anything but the most rudimentary constructs, because of the ridiculous amount of language they need to support.
because the language stuffs a trinary logic (true,false,null) into a binary logic system and grants you access to all of the benefits of both false positive results and false negatives.
because the relational algebra is elegant, in all the ways the SQL language is not.
But we'll stay with it, because at the end of the day, no one gives a shit about SQL. The SQL language is just the interface to the Glory of Codd, the relational algebra, the RDBMS, and in this we find all true value. But we can still dream of a better world. A world where RDBMS's support more than one query language.