This is basically a strawman + appeal to authority argument. I've no desire to bicker. "Uniquely terrible" is quite subjective, we'll have to agree to disagree on if it applies to sql.
I'm not going to write an article on this for you, but you can certainly see the sentiment frequently expressed on HN that the rise of NoSQL and of ORM's is a direct result of otherwise capable programmers not wanting to deal with SQL and its conceptual building blocks such as joins. Take that for what you will, but you might suspect there's a reason for it, and that it's not merely the learning curve for "every language".
SQL isn’t going away any time soon. At its heart, it’s relational algebra. If you can learn DS&A, you can learn relational algebra.
You're right that it isn't going away, but when it does, I'll be the first to dance on its grave.
I think I saw that sentiment a lot 5+ years ago. The last 2-3 years have been a lot more for postgresql and writing SQL directly.
Either way I don't think that "excellent coders" "despise" learning SQL, almost every senior coder that has interacted with a medium-to-large database has understood and valued SQL in my experience.
I've been coding professionally for 20 years and at every job I've ever had we've made the decision to move away from ORMs or as much as possible given the constraints of our system in preference of directly writing SQL. My previous employer dumped Rail in favor of a Go backend (a language whose userbase almost entirely eschews the idea of ORMs) and my current employer never even had one to start with, choose to write SQL directly in a typescript backend.
I'm not going to pull the stats for you but this very website is FULL of articles talking about the benefits of writing your own SQL and I can't even remember the last time someone tried to pitch me a shiny new ORM.
> teaching people arcane terminology distinctions like between WHERE and HAVING
This is akin to complaining about needing to teach people arcane terminology distinctions between FOR and WHILE. I think it's a crime that many CS degrees I see don't include a course in database and SQL. There are of course some arcade corners of SQL (I sometimes have to look up the different JSONB operators in postgres), but WHERE and HAVING ain't it.
> flipping a coin on whether the query engine will use the index and execute in 10 ms, or decide to follow a different execution plan and take 5 minutes to run
Heavens, if you think using an ORM is going to help you here, have you got another think coming.
Your take on this is so foreign to me I was honestly shocked to see it. That being said, you probably aren't the only one, so perhaps my perspective is more narrow than I had assumed as well.