Same here. Intuitive is probably the wrong word. I think I'm still looking for the right word to use to describe the idea. I think there was some progress from a fb team that translated english language queries into sql.
I hope there is more progress in the field so that the same people who write the content can search it and use it like a dev would. I think that given a stack of 5K blog posts, any dev can pump out a dozen charts and word graphs or whatever given some time, and it would all look pretty good but probably not have as much value as an editor's summary. But if the editor could also make use of the dev tooling to do more in depth research or produce some new insights, or get to the "important" information more quickly, than that would represent a step in the right direction.
To me, I don't find Jq at all intuitive. The fact that filtering a collection is expressed this way, for example:
is not "intuitive", because it doesn't look like anything else. The pipe operator certainly behaves very differently from Unix shells; it's the "[]" part that causes iteration, not the pipe.I absolutely see your point about abstracting away complexity. Developers have a lot of knowledge in their heads about how SQL translates to execution complexity, and GROQ is more opaque. We do have an "explain" mode that shows the query plan, but we are still thinking about ways to make the execution model more transparent and understandable.