For an application level interface they make sense - they’re trivial to generate and parse in any language, don’t require expensive bespoke parsers and lexers t

For an application level interface they make sense - they’re trivial to generate and parse in any language, don’t require expensive bespoke parsers and lexers to be written, and the basic constructs are more appropriate for a query interface than something like JSON or other common serialization formats while still being human readable if needed. Again, SQL isn’t a terrible language - it’s just not designed to be mechanically generated in a sane manner. Libraries like jOOQ are useful because they handle a lot of pitfalls with runtime-generated queries, when we could avoid them altogether by having a better way of applications (rather than users) to query and manipulate data.