Reading the original notes for SQL, I remember reading it was designed as a human readable query lang. I think you have to remember the context of the time. At

Reading the original notes for SQL, I remember reading it was designed as a human readable query lang. I think you have to remember the context of the time. At the time (in the 60's), the alternative to SQL was writing your own imperative implementation of a query through a hierarchical database. Kinda like if you had to implement traversal through an XML document every time you had a new query. In some ways, that's what we're doing nowadays writing resolvers with graphql servers. Composition was bolted on later as an afterthought. The requirements we have for a query language is different with a different environment now.