Clojure exists because rhickey didn't like the current state of programming languages. Dataomic exists because rhickey didn't like the current state of DB design. SQL is an anti-goal.
"Familiarity" is a terrible metric for new things. New things are not always familiar. As rhickey said in one of his talks, there's a difference between what's simple, and what's familiar. "I don't know German, does that make it unreadable?". German may or may not be the ideal thing, but the fact that it isn't english is not an argument against it.
> Just out of curiosity, what would you call this language then: [:find ?entity :where [?entity :db/doc \"hello world\"]]?
Datalog (or a dialect of it). Datalog is a variation on prolog, designed for querying databases. Just as there are many lisps, there are many datalogs. This one is interesting because datomic querys are valid clojure data structures. It's a great example of code as data. It's trivial to write clojure functions that return data that can be passed as a query to datomic. If you wanted, you could probably even write datomic queries that return other queries. Try doing that with SQL ;-)
I made my first comments under the assumption that this aims to be a general purpose database, but multiple people have made clear now that this is not the case.
Obviously it makes no sense to argue for an intermediate QL (and one as half-baked as SQL) when the project is ultimately aimed at Lisp-purists[1].
[1] This is not meant derogatory, it's just a critical distinction from a DB that, say, my junior-admin who knows his SQL and Python and not much else could be expected to get along with.
"Familiarity" is a terrible metric for new things. New things are not always familiar. As rhickey said in one of his talks, there's a difference between what's simple, and what's familiar. "I don't know German, does that make it unreadable?". German may or may not be the ideal thing, but the fact that it isn't english is not an argument against it.
> Just out of curiosity, what would you call this language then: [:find ?entity :where [?entity :db/doc \"hello world\"]]?
Datalog (or a dialect of it). Datalog is a variation on prolog, designed for querying databases. Just as there are many lisps, there are many datalogs. This one is interesting because datomic querys are valid clojure data structures. It's a great example of code as data. It's trivial to write clojure functions that return data that can be passed as a query to datomic. If you wanted, you could probably even write datomic queries that return other queries. Try doing that with SQL ;-)