Syntax aside, programmers and mathematicians have a very different view on how things should be done.
Programmers look at data and see opportunities for running a pipeline of transformations (map/filter/...). And they tend to write their SQL like this as well. Or use something like Linq or one of the various pipe syntax SQL extensions.
I would say that this is a major reason why there is this sentiment of "SQL is yucky" by developers. The mental models just don't match.
Data storage and retrieval is a different domain than data processing. SQL is very good at the former, not so great for the latter.
SQL is closer to array programming than the usual imperative implementation of looping (and stream programming like the one in Java and Javascript). A better implementation is functional programming like haskell and clojure (lazy and composition of functions).
I think developers should be able to switch their mental model on the fly according to the current domain instead of getting stuck in the first paradigm they have learned.