Really intriguing article about a SQL syntax extension that has apparently already been trialed at Google.
As someone who works with SQL for hours every week, this makes me hopeful for potential improvements, although the likelihood of any changes to SQL arriving in my sector before I retire seems slim.
I think that makes it harder to work in a language… you certainly can set up an editor autoreplacement but once a decade or so someone’s going to need to hotfix something in a strange environment and trying to force things into nano using alt codes is a real pain.
That said the intentionally hard to type symbols with ascii replacements actually make me less sad than things like this syntax that requires a pipe character… I don’t know if you’re a polyglot (or ever typed on a keyboard in quebec) but most of these languages’ symbol choices are convenient on an en-US keyboard with little consideration for international keyboard layouts and there are a lot of hard to type symbols on the spanish keyboard that are very common in programming languages.