> For query languages, at least, they seem to like SQL the most of all the things I've tried, and I strongly suspect that it's the same underlying cause.
The reason they like SQL more than other query languages is primarily that their training data has orders of magnitude more of it than any other query language, and that advantage is so huge that any other possible advantage would probably have comparatively negligible effect.
I'm not so sure about that. This was in comparison to e.g. walking object graphs in Python, C#, and JavaScript using the usual APIs (i.e. where querying one one-to-many relationship looks like Foo.Bars rather than joins, and using map/fold/filter or equivalents). I would expect there to be a lot more of that kinda stuff in the training set than SQL.
The reason they like SQL more than other query languages is primarily that their training data has orders of magnitude more of it than any other query language, and that advantage is so huge that any other possible advantage would probably have comparatively negligible effect.