> If you are a junior developer, “learn SQL properly” is the most valuable 40 hours you can spend. Not a tutorial. Not an ORM. Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans. That investment pays you back at every job, in every stack, for decades

This is the power of low-level reasoning.

Today, even for a junior developers, even if they have AI that solves syntax problems, SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically. Without any wrapper masking low-level logic.

It's something like the letters of the alphabet that form concepts: why should they change?

I find SQL a very thick "wrapper masking low-level logic". Think of the query planning, the index-maintaining, the upholding of guarantees, the writing-to-disk and caching that you are all not doing by using a RDBMS!

I'd say SQL is a very high level language.

"SQL teaches you to reason and approach problems logically" -- I kind of agree here. It teaches relational data mgmt. I think it is better to attack most software design challenges at a higher level, and --once settled at that level-- consider how to "serialize" those solutions to an RDBMS (if that's the tech that you've chosen for persistence; still a very solid choice after 50+ years!).

>, SQL teaches you [...] Without any wrapper masking low-level logic.

I understand the point you're trying to make, and yes, it does seem like SQL is "low-level" from the perspective a wrapper like ORMs or a GUI db browser tool with menus for filtering data.

But it's also worth remembering that SQL itself is a high-level wrapper that hides the lower-level C/C++ code of the db engine that has the loops that iterate through b-trees, 8k data pages, memory blocks of the buffer cache, etc.

And C/C++ itself is a high-level wrapper that hides the logic in lower-level Linux o/s system calls that manages RAM and disk i/o.

And Linux itself is a high-level wrapper that hides low-level device drivers like SATA/SSD memory-mapped IO ... and so on and so on.

Depending on the type of app, you can ignore all the lower levels and just work at the abstraction level of higher-level wrappers.

A couple of sites worth checking out to level up, both by Markus Winand:

https://modern-sql.com/

https://use-the-index-luke.com/

The whys will vary, but letters of alphabets do change indeed.