I realise this is meant to be a jab at high-level programming languages, but SQL really did succeed at that. Its abstraction may leak sometimes, but most peopl

I realise this is meant to be a jab at high-level programming languages, but SQL really did succeed at that. Its abstraction may leak sometimes, but most people using it are incredibly productive without needing to learn what a spool operator or bitmap does. Even though the GUI and natural language aspects of 4GL failed, declarative programming was worth it.