A recent paper by Google argues that SQL is not user-friendly because you can’t read it top-down. E.g. processing starts at the “bottom” in the FROM clause or in subqueries (but there are more problems). Alternative languages like KQL and PRQL solved that but nobody adopted them. Google proposes to extend SQL with a pipe operator which makes the syntax a lot more readable, e.g.

The new syntax is quite light-weight and it can be mapped one-to-one to standard SQL, i.e. only parser changes are needed.