Assembly has been largely replaced by higher level programming languages. And since SQL is a fourth generation declarative language, I really don't see how it

Assembly has been largely replaced by higher level programming languages. And since SQL is a fourth generation declarative language, I really don't see how it could go the same way as assembly by being replaced with imperative programming. It's already more expressive and succint, and have stronger abstractions from implementation details, than imperative programming languages.