Oh yeah, I meant more in the sense of studying the history. There are a lot of papers I need to read from those times. Datalog probably wouldn’t be for me, but it seems some are still trying to make fetch happen. Although those guys seem to have forgotten how to write about anything other than “AI agents”, so I’m not sure it’s going well.
The thing about SQL is that it has been influenced by a great many things because it is so inexpressive and inextensible that the only way to add new functionality is to further bloat the (incredibly bloated) standard with one-off features.
For example, apparently recursive queries (1999) were inspired by Datalog. Can you imagine if somebody “added recursion” to Python or JavaScript? What would that even mean?
