"I used MySQL for years, long ago, and never wrote a join."

Wow.

Note to self: start asking candidates to write SQL in interviews.

It had just never occurred to me that people who spend their entire lives talking to databases wouldn't know how to talk to them directly.

And really, you can get pretty much any piece of information out of a database using just four keywords. It's the least memorization of any language in history. SELECT, FROM, WHERE, and for extra credit, LIKE. That's it. That'll get you any non-aggregate dataset you could want, joined or otherwise.

Learn IN and GROUP BY and you've got everything else you'll ever need for reporting. It's just the simplest language ever.