>And Bill is ignoring the work of learning how to program.
I suppose if you didn't know how to program you wouldn't learn Sparql. So the investment in learning how to program has already been made.
Ah, but the response might go, lots of people learned SQL when there weren't a lot of jobs for people who knew SQL.
Yes, my response would be, but that was a long time ago and the incentives for people to learn technologies have changed, and I do not think a significant amount of people will learn SQL without learning to program henceforth; at least not amounts significant enough that anyone will say "Well look at that trend!".
here there can be several responses so I won't go through all the branches, but in the end I don't think there is going to be an interest in learning Sparql in people who are not programmers or at least programming adjacent professions, and from what I see there hasn't been that much interest from people who are programmers.
So no, every query languages are not born the same. SPARQL is overly technical and requires a lot of knowledge to do even the simpliest things.