A colleague drew my attention to the following announcement from yesterday:
The language itself looks like a Prolog/Datalog derivative: https://logica.dev/
but I guess it is “modern” in the sense that it works with BigQuery.
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" Among database theoreticians Datalog and SQL are known to be equivalent . And indeed the conversion from Datalog to SQL and back is often straightforward. However there are a few nuances, for example how to treat disjunction and negation. (from the site).
If i recall correctly, the null value is problematic as well … and needs handling.
To me it seems that they took Prolog/Datalog syntax, then changed it so that it is straight-forward to mechanically translate it to SQL (with Python), then used that SQL with BigQuery as a backend.
The interesting message to me is that indeed, there is very little a programmer wouldn’t do to avoid writing SQL 
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I also avoided SQL where i could – i got myself a visual tool where i could drag and drop tables and get typical queries generated … was a pleasure to work with … since most querying requirements i had at the time was joining normalized tables and selecting subsets with criteria.
Logica is making waves: Google proposes Logica data language for building more manageable SQL code • The Register
Got the link from CodeProject (mainly a Windows/M$ resource). Overall, seems good news to me.
Have skimmed the Logica description/examples, I rather like it, and wonder if there could be some interest in having such interface available over Swipl ODBC.