Programmer Humor

Personally I feel like SQL syntax is upside down, and things are used before they are defined.

SELECT 
a.id -- what the fuck is a?
, a.name
, b.city -- and b??
from users a -- oh 
join city b on a.id = b.user_id -- oh here's b

I'd expect it to instead be like

From users a
join city b on a.id = b.user_id
SELECT
a.id,
a.name,
b.city

It seems that you need to get better. There are plenty of valid complaints against SQL, but your problems seem to be all due to lack of familiarity.

No variables, no functions; Oh but you can do a CTE

Yeah, CTEs are more expressive than variables. And as somebody pointed, every database out there supports functions, you may want to look how they work.

UNION ALL, UNION ALL, UNION ALL… “There’s got to be a better way, surely…”

What do you mean by a "better way"? Union all is a perfectly valid operation.

And then you try put a MAX in a where and it won’t let you because you gotta pull all the maxes out in their own query, make a table, join them in, and use them like a filter…

Window functions exist.

No variables, no functions

Every major SQL implementation includes both of those things. Of course, it's rarely needed or desirable if you know how to properly write SQL.

"So why can't you do that with expressions?"

You can alias expressions.

And then you try put a MAX in a where and it won't let you because you gotta pull all the maxes out in their own query, make a table, join them in, and use them like a filter...

Wtf are you talking about? For one, filtering by the output of an aggregate is what the HAVING clause is for. But even if that didn't exist, you could just use a subquery instead. You don't need to make table...

Tbh it just sounds like you don't know SQL very well. Which is fine, but doesn't make for a very compelling criticism. SQL does have warts (even though it's great overall), but none of what you described are real problems.

While I agree that "SQL Enjoyer" seems like a weird category, I personally love SQL. I've been using it professionally for over 20 years, and I've yet to encounter a more elegant, efficient, and practical language for handling data in a relational database. Every attempt I've seen to replace it with something simpler has fallen far short.

Which database systems were you dealing with, that didn't allow variables? My personal favorite is PostgreSQL, which does allow them on scripting languages, such as PLPGSQL.

LEFT JOIN

Includes empty entries, doubles others.

...

It sure is long due for an overhaul.