You are right about SQL folks. But it is an explicit design decision of Slick to model its API and also more and more its semantics after Scala and its collections library. (This was different in ScalaQuery by the way, which was modeled more after SQL. There has been a migration process on the way to Slick to adopt Scala api and semantics, which has not been yet entirely completed, when you look at handling of nullable values in Slick vs. Scala for example). Slick like LINQ is not meant to be SQL-specific in the long run. If you want a library that looks and feels like SQL you should use JOOQ or Squeryl. I am against an alias `except` for api conformity and uniformity reasons.