alt Hacker NewsA great thing about being a programmer is getting to complain about the crappy requirements you have to work with. SQL, on the other hand, is not a program - it’s a precise specification of the result you want, in a format that lets the database engine write the “program” for you. Thus, writing SQL helps you appreciate the struggle to achieve good requirements, and there is a chance you will develop empathy for those cursed to write them.
That can be said of any program written in a pure declarative language, but even so not all of them look like SQL. And, yes, they are still programs.