Oh, I trust the current stable platforms to be the current stable platforms. My beef isn't with people who use them. It's with people who don't know how to do anything else, which was a plague on our industry for at least a decade. At least the people who get burnt on the latest fad will make new and interesting mistakes.

I agree that when we can find ways to let users serve themselves, that's best for everybody. I just don't think universal pseudo-English query languages are the way to do that, because the hard part isn't learning a little syntax, it's learning what the syntax represents in terms of machine operations.

Once the programmer and the analyst have found something stable enough to automate, by all means automate it. Reports, report builders, DSLs, data dumps, specialized analytic tools: all great in the right conditions. But people have been trying to build pseudo-English PHB-friendly tools for decades with near zero uptake from that audience. I think there's a reason for that.