I'm sure some smart people could come up with a SQL-esque language that is even more readable to non-technical folks than programming syntax.

And somehow, none of the thousands of very smart mathematicians have done that, or if they had, it has not seen wide adoption. I recommend contemplating on this: if math could be made easier by changing notation, why hasn't this already happened?

Momentum, mainly. Richard Feynman invented a more intuitive triangle-based syntax for sin/cos/tan/etc but eventually abandoned it and conformed with mathematical norms for the sake of ubiquity.