Ironically, expressing this in something like SQL actually speaks to the expressivity of the language because the solution was produced entirely with syntactic

Ironically, expressing this in something like SQL actually speaks to the expressivity of the language because the solution was produced entirely with syntactic forms. What? Pure untyped lambda calculus does things "only with syntactic forms". Don't tell me that your solution wouldn't use some basic operators other than rudimentary syntax. Keep in mind that in Lisp-family languages, many things that are a part of syntax in other languages are actually simple functions - arithmetic operations being a case in point - so you really can't avoid using library functions. I believe that the major point of Clojure etc. is that they provide concise basic operations that you can use everywhere to compose complex operations better than you can do with, say, C#.