right; this is why I won't accept that SQL is good-enough, so DSL's aren't worth looking at. The current state of affairs should be despised just as much as JS-

right; this is why I won't accept that SQL is good-enough, so DSL's aren't worth looking at. The current state of affairs should be despised just as much as JS-only browsers -- these DSLs are an attempt to alleviate the suffering! SQL even shares many of the same issues -- weird semantics (stuffing a trinary logic into boolean operations, enabling both false negatives and false positives), lack of a proper library/module system, inconsistent language, non-composable features, etc. The difference is only that with JS, there are many better-behaved popular languages to look to and criticize it on. With SQL, there are competing languages implementing the relational algebra, but they're mainly serve as a curiosity and few use them in practice; there is SQL and only SQL. You can fairly argue that the DSL cannot fundamentally succeed until RDBMS vendors finally buy into it, but you can't argue that SQL is such a great representation of the relational algebra that it isn't worth bothering with; it's just the language we happen to be stuck with.