&gt;&gt;&gt; extremely quirky programming language from the 70&#x27;s (or whenever)<p>Because it doesn&#x27;t have to be shinny and all, it just works. There are no widely used alternatives, so we can say that people are happy-enough using it. See the situation with JS. CoffeeScript and all, it&#x27;s quite popular. Is there an analogy (in terms of functionality and popularity) in SQL? Nope. No one bothered to do it well enough, or not enough people found that it&#x27;s worth enough to learn it.<p>We don&#x27;t need to reinvent something every few years just because new JS frameworks come out and others are forgotten every few months.