Recent work by Google [1] argues that SQL is not user-friendly because you can't read it top-down. E.g. processing starts at the "bottom" in the FROM clause or in subqueries (but there are more problems). Alternative languages like KQL and PRQL solved that but nobody adopted them. [1] ]proposes to extend SQL with a pipe operator which makes the syntax a lot more readable, e.g. TPC q13 becomes

FROM customer
|> LEFT OUTER JOIN orders ON c_custkey = o_custkey
   AND o_comment NOT LIKE '%unusual%packages%'
|> AGGREGATE COUNT(o_orderkey) c_count
   GROUP BY c_custkey
|> AGGREGATE COUNT(*) AS custdist
   GROUP BY c_count
|> ORDER BY custdist DESC, c_count DESC;

The new syntax is quite light-weight and it can be mapped one-to-one to standard SQL, i.e. only parser changes are needed. They say they deployed pipe SQL to all their internal users (they loved it, an open-source implementation is available at [2]) and will ship it soon to all their public systems. Chances are that other vendors will implement that as well.

All it takes for ClickHouse to support pipe syntax is a brave person who hacks pipe support into our SQL frontend.

[1] SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax in SQL
[2] https://github.com/google/zetasql