I second this emotion SO HARD. Is sql weird? sure. But (IMO) the hard part implementing|using a sql database is _not_ the syntax, it's the storage, query plan

I second this emotion SO HARD. Is sql weird? sure. But (IMO) the hard part implementing|using a sql database is _not_ the syntax, it's the storage, query planning, consistency. Don't like SQL? use linq or one of the bazillion DSL libraries that "compile" to sql. SQL databases are so unbelievably extremely useful, and the minor syntax quirks between different DBs are a minor issue compared to the huge amount of commonality that they share. Also FWIW, I'm not sure that writing a sql validator _is_ all that hard. The grammars for any dialect are readily available and really not so hard to turn into an AST with any of your favorite tools (ANTLR, lex/yacc/bison, any of a million PEG parser generators). In many cases you don't even need to, we do static analysis of spark SQL using their own parser, for postgres can use the parser straight out of libpg. I guess the OPs point is that if you can validate it easily, you can understand it. I'm certain I could write a lisp parser in 10 minutes, but I don't think that would mean I immediately understand all Clojure code (which is often pretty obtuse). You still need to learn all the underlying concepts and data structures.