Agreed that SQL lends itself to spaghetti. However after working with it for 25 years both as a developer but also collaborating with analysts and data scientists, I have to say I appreciate its basic declarative nature and remarkable portability as it has expanded into distributed databases.
For me the value of being able to walk up to an unfamiliar database of widely varying tech and start getting value out of it immediately is the killer app. Macros or other DB-specific extensions would be useful at times, but I’m not sure how much they would enable solving the messiness problem in a generic way that reshapes the paradigm more broadly. My instinct is the messiness is a consequence of the direct utility and trying to make it nicer from a programmerly aesthetics point of view might be hard to sell. It’s not like SQL doesn’t have affordances for aesthetics already (eg. WITH clauses).
For me the value of being able to walk up to an unfamiliar database of widely varying tech and start getting value out of it immediately is the killer app. Macros or other DB-specific extensions would be useful at times, but I’m not sure how much they would enable solving the messiness problem in a generic way that reshapes the paradigm more broadly. My instinct is the messiness is a consequence of the direct utility and trying to make it nicer from a programmerly aesthetics point of view might be hard to sell. It’s not like SQL doesn’t have affordances for aesthetics already (eg. WITH clauses).