My hope with the post is to convince you that both the syntax and semantics of Malloy are more than just different, and indeed are actually better.

In the article, the SQL example results in output that cannot be used safely by downstream queries (i.e., it breaks algebraic substitution). This is generally true of any query in SQL that tries to aggregate along multiple levels of granularity. Malloy solves this limitation by making "nesting" of relations a first-class part of the language.