Remember the promise of a "declarative language" where you just had to tell it what you want, and it took care of the details?
You could argue CSS is a failure, because designers don't know that
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http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5797014/why-do-browsers-m...
How can you apply a blanket "premature" to this? The questions are simply "can this be improved?". There's nothing premature about it, it is a quiz.
"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." --Donald Knuth
I am not sure what the exception is about. I agree 100% with the rest of your comment.
This quiz is about performance tuning, not correctness. For plenty of valuable real-people use cases, it's plenty fast without any performance tuning.
Honestly though the nice thing about SQL is you can quickly get something that works, and then use tracing tools to figure out what is taking longer than it should.
Think of the first question. If you're going to use a function to transform data, you're going to take a performance hit vs. just doing and indexable operation against the data.
If you want a facility that will magically figure out what you want when you are unable to express what you want, good luck. That's unicorn territory.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage
It's like calculus, you can compute efficiently or inefficiently it has nothing to do with calculus.
The same developers that make retarded SQL queries make god awfully slow programs with their pointer chasing mess because they don't understand that their programs run on actual real hardware and that a cache miss is pretty much the single most expensive operation a modern CPU can make by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude.
They just go on and on about interfaces, inline methods, virtual methods, etc, and never check whether their fancy smancy object fits on a cache line. Its the same with databases they just talk about 'webscale' and 'big data' abandon SQL and then wonder why their DB explodes once it reaches 100 GB.
There were other query languages that were less of a messy compromise. QUEL, for example was based more rigorously on relational calculus. I think it never took off because the dumbed-down SQL was a little easier for programmers to conceptualize initially.