I’ve long felt that SQL was somehow backwards, but I don’t know what would be better. ‘Go and get two eggs’ Is better than ‘go to the fridge and get eggs, only two’.
Strictly following the semantics order of the querying, whether forward or reverse.
The ordering issue of SQL is that it uses a mixed ordering, the physical layout of the query in text form doesn’t follow the logical execution of the query, which makes it very confusing.
Comparing to short cutesy sentences is not helpful as a non-trivial query has dozens or hundreds of steps, it’s closer to a build book or checklist.
Furthermore english is far from a paragon of clarity or regularity, and languages which try to follow it (SQL, AppleScript) tend to scale a lot worse with instruction sizes and complexity.
You can sort of already do this in SQL with CTE* but a nice pipeline syntax would be welcome.
* Actually I believe that you can do more with CTE as you can mix the various steps in arbitrary ways
It'd translate to
select top 2 eggs from fridge;
FETCH FIRST n ROWS ONLY