> In general, the spec must be human readable, and I believe to achieve that we must do away with SQL
Eh. Carthago delenda est? Why?
Yeah, that's the most impractical part of the original post.
Like, SQL was around before I was born, and barring the immanence of the Machine God (and potentially even then), will be around long after I die (unless civilisation collapses, I guess).
SQL is a lot more intellectually coherent than its syntax belies. It's easy to be attracted to things like SPARQL, which has a well-written simple public spec, or Datalog, which doesn't really have a spec but does CTE in a way that doesn't look so painfully half-baked, or to feel really queasy looking at triggers and other features... but SQL isn't that bad. Dialects like postgres actually have pretty good support for JSON.
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