Reading this gave me a weird idea. What if SQL is so successful exactly because its syntax makes JOIN operations cumbersome. Other languages where joins are syntactically convenient (e.g. datalog) make it much easier to write slow queries, whereas SQL forces you to denormalise tables tables from a syntactical standpoint already, which later translates to performance gains when it comes to semantics.
In a sense SQL is the (typewriter) QWERTY of query languages. Inconvenient by design.
In a sense SQL is the (typewriter) QWERTY of query languages. Inconvenient by design.