Comment by setr

> making the syntax closer to a general purpose functional programming language

It’s more about having a consistent, predictable and simple language. Being more functional-like or imperative-like or declarative-like or whatever is just a byproduct. I suppose LISP is the extreme of that goal, and probably too extreme, but SQL itself is on the other end, with every clause and function running its own subsyntax and special cases. I believe I’ve read the ANSI SQL standard defines something like 1700 terminals — it’s absolutely absurd. And of course every database extends that standard arbitrarily with a slew of new keywords.

There’s a reason every RDBMS can only report errors like “syntax error on line 1: <entire query>” and it’s not because the devs are completely incompetent