Comment by crabmusket

It sounds like you want SQL to be more like a "real programming language", but I feel like there's a real chasm. SQL itself seems to be oriented towards "non-programmers" which is why it has declarative English syntax. But so many systems that interface with SQL databases are software systems written by programmers.

Why are our programming languages, which have rich ADTs, Boolean logic, etc. serialising queries into an English syntax written for ad-hoc business intelligence tasks? Why not have a binary query interface to the database that provides a programmatic, rather than human-readable, API?

The first time I got a "too many bind variables" error I was flabbergasted. All I wanted to do was insert a ton of rows into a table. But the database expects me to construct an English sentence containing a placeholder for each value of each row?