Are we really this devolved as coders? We can’t handle different syntaxes? We need LLMs to write queries? What the heck is going on with our industry?

Old man rant off.

I don't take it as too-much-syntax in the brain[0], but all of the problems bad syntax causes. We could still be writing code in assembly, but we have found that different languages make things easier or safer to construct.

I can trivially handle having to repeatedly bounce to the top-then-to-the-bottom of a query I am writing because I want to change the group-by or sorting order, but that is annoying friction. Since the language does not compose well, you need to keep most of the query in your head and cannot build it up piecemeal as easily as something like PRQL (https://prql-lang.org/)

[0] Although, it would be incredible if I could write timestamp formatting without having to look up the bespoke vendor incantation every time I switch dialects.

Syntax affects readability and writing speed a lot