The psuedocode in question happens to be syntactically valid Ruby. If the goal was to demonstrate how simple query generation could be without abstraction layer

The psuedocode in question happens to be syntactically valid Ruby. If the goal was to demonstrate how simple query generation could be without abstraction layers like Sequel, it is a valid criticism to note that the example given is eliding a necessary feature. Especially since helping avoid injections is one of the primary advantages of such an abstraction layer. The original argument was that if one could "just write SQL" one wouldn't need to refer to documentation to become productive, "not once". I don't personally think it's practical to use any database library without reading the documentation, but certainly the moment you get away from "the SQL I type in goes straight to the database" you're going to need documentation to tell you what's going to change. What's being described here sounds like a library that parses SQL fragments, combines them into whole queries, and sends them off to the database. To implement this this without resorting to simple string concatenation needs an intermediate representation of SQL language components. That intermediate representation is going to look a lot like SQLAlchemy, or Sequel, or Arel. That means that instead of "just writing SQL" you're actually adding an extra layer of abstraction and another chunk of documentation to read. All that said, the "just use SQL" approach is already fairly well served. Most languages have mature bindings to specific databases as well as at least one ODBC-style API to simplify access to those bindings. Nearly all of these have support for client-prepared statements, which handles the interpolation problem. If you want to build more complex queries on the fly, you can use string concatenation or CTEs or decide to use a SQLAlchemy/Sequel/Arel-type library for just that one case. And, honestly, you don't need to give up SQL to make use of Sequel. I personally really dislike the query composition API demonstrated at the top of this thread, but you can do useful things with Sequel without it: db = Sequel.sqlite db.execute "create table foos (id int not null, name text)" db.execute "insert into foos (id, name) values (1, 'bar')" # or db[:foos].insert(id: 2, name: "baz") db["select * from foos where id = ?", 1].first # ==> {:id=>1, :name=>"bar"} # or db[:foos]["id = ?", 2] # ==> {:id=>2, :name=>"baz"} No need to go any further than raw SQL, but increasing levels of abstraction available if you feel like it.