I'm skeptical that it's possible to assemble a working SQL query of much complexity unambiguously from an arbitrarily-ordered set of clauses. CTEs, subselects,

I'm skeptical that it's possible to assemble a working SQL query of much complexity unambiguously from an arbitrarily-ordered set of clauses. CTEs, subselects, and boolean conditions would require a nesting construct. Boolean conditions, order clauses, and some joins need to be assembled in a meaningful order. Eventually you're going to find a level of complexity in the query where it's necessary for a developer to read the documentation, either to figure out the API or to understand the method the library uses to stitch queries together. There might be a sweet spot yet unreached in terms of allowing developers to work with SQL on top of as minimal a native binding as possible. I'm certainly not claiming that Sequel/SQLAlchemy/etc. is at or near that sweet spot. It might be necessary to use a language with language-level support (or macros) to really reach it.