Comment by da_chicken

While I would certainly agree with you that putting the FROM clause first would be a significant improvement to SQL and was a genuine design mistake, this otherwise feels more like just wanting SQL to be less declarative and more imperative. Wanting it to be more like LINQ and less like relational algebra.

That, I think, is most developers' real sticking point with SQL. It's not object-relational impedance mismatch between their application and the data store, it's imperative-declarative impedance mismatch between their preferred or demonstrated talent. They are used to thinking about problems in exactly one way, so when they struggle to adapt to a different way of thinking about the problems they assume their familiarity is what's more correct.

I think this is why the same developers insist that XML/HTML is "just a markup language." Feeding a document into an executable to produce output isn't really significantly different than feeding imperative language into a compiler. The only real difference is that one is Turing complete, but Turning completeness is not a requirement of programming languages.