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From-before-select has nothing to do with composition as far as I can think of? That’s to solve the auto-complete issue — put the table first so the column list can be filtered.

Things like allowing repeat clauses, compute select before where, etc are what solve for composition issues

Is that really how it should be judged? If I need to get data from state A to state B, SQL is the most elegant and efficient way to do it. If I need to modify the states, or break them up to optimize for memory, SQL is the easiest way to do it. It’s been around for over 50 years and no one’s come up with anything better.

And some very simple computations become much more cumbersome in SQL, e.g. Panda's df.diff() or df.cumsum() is much more awkward using window "functions".