I’ve tried to make mockups of similarly inspired API and I think they did a great job with clever tricks like the `_` reference (does that clash with IPython/Jupyter’s use?).
I do wonder how they manage compatibility with so many backends, it seems like many features will be directly tied to your backend (e.g. Trino using Java Pattern for regex vs BigQuery using Re2) in hard to explain ways. But maybe that’s not a big concern, because very often you’re only going to be using a couple of backends.
I’ll have to try Ibis out for myself, it looks like it can unify a lot of the work I have to do. I’ve moved away from pandas for all but the last mile of computation, so this might be a direct good SQL replacement.