Comment by dgudkov

>PRQL is intended to be a modern, simple, declarative language for transforming data

It's not declarative. It's functional.

I believe that the approach that is followed by PRQL is more practical than SQL. We've implemented a similar approach in our visual ETL tool for non-technical people (https://easymorph.com) and it works wonderfully. Other cool things you can do with this approach (and can't with SQL):

* Modify existing columns without re-selecting the whole dataset

* Loops (iterations)

* Conditional IF/THEN/ELSE branching as a workflow statement

* Exceptions & error handling