He says he's been using the explicit query language for a couple of months. On that timescale, I can see how it might still feel okay. But as the months become

He says he's been using the explicit query language for a couple of months. On that timescale, I can see how it might still feel okay. But as the months become years and your code grows in complexity to meet an ever lengthening requirements list, it should become apparent why SQL is far superior. Need to add an index to speed up some queries? In SQL, you add the index and you're done. In an explicit query language, you add the index and... oops, that doesn't do anything. You've got to go back and inspect every single query, anywhere in your program, that could potentially benefit from that index, to see whether it actually will, and if so, modify it by hand. Switching from SQL to an explicit query language converts certain types of programming effort from O(N) to O(N^2). This is one of the reasons SQL was invented in the first place.