I've learned SQL around 20 years ago, and in all this time I've felt it was just a poorly designed language. It was always infuriating to write because of its verbose nature. Keywords were split into two words. I'm still shocked it's not "GROUPBY". There is no composition and modularization of logic, queries become massive expressions.

I know I'm in the minority in places like this, but I've spent all my life using ORMs, and never once regretted it. And I'm the kind of person that actually likes low-level C from time to time. SQL just feels like a poor abstraction layer: either go higher or lower.

It’s a good abstraction layer, and a fundamentally good/effecient model of organization and data management. It’s a horrible language, has a meaningless standards doc, some of the worst debugging tooling of modern system and generally any tooling outside of the RDBMS engine itself is 20 years stale.

The only difficult part in arguing this is that RDBMS != SQL != RelationalAlgebra, and it’s very often forgotten