I’m not a very organised person. I try to be, but it takes a lot of effort, and, being a programmer, I’m a naturally lazy sort of person. Whenever there’s a repetitive problem, I lean toward automating it in the most generally applicable way possible.

There are any number of tools for organising information, but they all tend to be either highly specific, such as a todo list, or very difficult to automatically organise and sort, such as a wiki. Ideally, I’d like a system that gives me the best of both worlds; the ability to restrict data to a specific form, but a form of my choosing. Essentially, I want a database.

However, most databases aren’t designed for quick, user-friendly, interactive use; that’s why we spend so much effort putting pretty frontends on them. Unfortunately, these facades often limit what we can do. Once we wrap our database in a GUI, we can no longer execute abitrary queries to pull out the data we want.

So what I really want is an interface that allows me to retain all the flexibility of the underlying database. In other words, I want a CLI, a REPL, an interactive prompt which I can use to query and build my database. And for this I need a query language that is both concise and succinct, something I can use to create queries in seconds, and something whose entire syntax can fit on the back of a postcard.

Ever heard of ISBL?

You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t. Wikipedia devotes only a single sentence to it, and you’re unlikely to find it mentioned in any database textbook. It’s a relational database language that was developed during the 1970s at IBM’s UK Scientific Centre, around about the time that SQL was being spawned in IBMs US labs.

ISBL never took off, whilst SQL became ubiquitous. This is a shame, because ISBL was an elegant system that used only six query operators, and was firmly based on Codd’s relational model; conversely, SQL was a mixed up mess of inconsistent keywords and terrible design decisions.

In today’s SQL dominated world, modern programmers may be sceptical of my opinions. Sure, SQL may have it’s quirks, but it’s not that bad a language - is it? Rather than lecture you, I’ll provide an example…