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One major strength of SQL is its readability - it reads so much like English that a non-technical stakeholder could conceivably understand queries. Do you not find that this is a valuable thing that's lost with relational-algebra-esque syntax?

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I haven’t one time in my 20 years of development had a time where that readability mattered tho. SQL very quickly becomes too complex for people who don’t intimately understand the language to make any sense out of it. Show a layman an INNER JOIN and see if they can make any sense out of what’s happening...they’ll just do what they do in real life: ask an engineer.

I'm in full agreement. Trivial SQL is somewhat readable, but anything non-trivial is not, and the order of SQL queries, that there is essentially no relationship between the syntactic and semantic orderings, make it hard to understand.

QUEL is better there but still not great unless its execution semantics are different than SQL's (aka semantically does it filter before or after selection?)

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