I don’t understand this attitude. We have many tens of programming languages for logic. Why is it that we really only have one that’s portable and that we came up with this idea 30 years ago? That just doesn’t seem plausible to me.
Almost 50 years ago in fact. And there were alternatives all along that timeline and many before it.
SQL is the first and possibly the only successful fourth gen programming language, and the most substantive complaints generally boil down to "SELECT should have been after FROM and WHERE". The vast majority of the seekers to the crown have been third generation languages trying to fake it with relational algebra, and data is just too important to allow side effects.
In short, don't assume because something has lasted in the computing world for 50 years that it is fundamentally flawed and only due to inertia. That would be a very foolish assumption indeed.
SQL is a DSL for set theory and as such any viable replacement will look substantially like it. When the differences are subtle, the impetus to retool/rewrite just evaporate.
