Yes, and the fact that a relational model is such a convenient way to represent lots of data problems means that even if SQL disappeared, the concept and usefulness of a relational database would long outlive it.

Lindy Effect.

I can't tell if you're describing or disputing the comment you replied to.

Are you saying SQL survived only because people have used it for so long and therefore its sustained use isn't an indicator of value?

If you read up on what Taleb writes about Lindy Effect, you should be able to understand.

OP said that it's probably good because it has lasted so long. I would agree.

> SQL still works as well as it does today

Or... It sucks as badly now as it did back then.

Well, no. There were a zillion databases competing and SQL is what survived. The NoSQL movement has created a bunch of useful DBs for specific scaling workloads, and of course there are graph DBs and other special purpose DBs, but SQL still dominates, and with good reason: it's the right balance of performance, flexibility, structure and integrity that makes it an excellent hedge for the early phases of application development when you're not yet sure what exactly the workload is going to look like.

HTML and CSS "won" on the web. No one in their right mind would call them good or even suitable for their main use case.

Of course they are. Most things on the web are documents. The fact that it is abused for SPAs means that yes they are contorted and abused, but that is inevitable because Gall's Law.

It's easy sit in an armchair and point out all the warts on specific tech, but if you were to build a better solution to broad technology segments like this, and magically get adoption, you'd find that you only understood 5% of the application space, and your better version is subject to whole swaths of criticism that you didn't anticipate. Better to find one small/simple thing you can do well and build from there.

What's more suitable for their main use case? What is their main use case?

Every time I have to glue together pieces of SQL at runtime I have to agree. It seems crazy to me that there is no "native" way to query relational DB's (yes, there are some SQL factories for certain languages)

SQL is the native way query RDBMS.