Dev teams and analysts use text files, Gists, and emails to save hundreds of useful queries containing similar patterns, subqueries, and clauses that could easily be repurposed if the language had any reusability features. There's a lot of waste and it can feel like a big task to ask a simple question.
That said, it's very easy to learn SQL and the author's suggestions don't seem to maintain that learning curve. I disagree that "human language mimicking" is a problem -- SQL syntax actually makes a lot of sense (I'm "SELECTing FROM a table and ORDERing the results" etc).
What we need is a higher level language or tool to describe relations in a database -- something like an ORM or XML used in legacy BI tools. SQL still lives underneath. IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, Microstrategy, and others tried this to varying levels of success. Another commenter (siganakis) gets it right: "I would prefer a syntax layer that can be compiled / transformed back to SQL."
We're actually working on something very similar to that at Looker (http://looker.com) if anyone is interested in hearing more about it, but we aren't quite at the point where we can release the language spec to the world yet.