I've been programming for most of my life. SQL has been a big part of my career. And I love it. It's one of my top 5 languages. It's a nice, functional, declar

I've been programming for most of my life. SQL has been a big part of my career. And I love it. It's one of my top 5 languages. It's a nice, functional, declarative language in the vein of prolog and such. You just tell it the shape of the data you want, where to materialize it from, filter, aggregate, calculate the window of, etc... and the system figures out how to execute it as efficiently as it can. It beats out procedurally munging data by a long shot. It's more concise for many operations than ML-like variants. It's a great tool to have. And understanding the underlying maths, relational algebra, is beautiful. I've found trying to implement your own rick-shod relational database is a good way to try to mechanically understand the theory. Then move on to implementing datalog... etc. The reason why SQL continues to stick around is that the fundamental theories are quite sharp! I'd appreciate a more concise syntax some days but overall I can't say I'm displeased. It's great!