Article author here -- DuckDB is indeed cool.
Another interesting bit of work in this space is LINQ on the microsoft side of things. And even list comprehensions end up having a scanning/summing language kind of feel to them that would be interesting to see translated into a new database query language.
Have other implementations done anything for making queries easier (that don't involve requiring an IDE or anything, so just query language innovations)?
Edit: Not query language innovations but ClickHouse and Snowflake's "standard library" of builtin functions just keep getting better and better. Once I saw `parseDateTimeBestEffort` in ClickHouse I wanted that everywhere...