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Comment by ryathal | Hacker News Reader

SQL syntax is designed for reading, which is the majority of coding time. What gets selected is generally the thing most cared about so it goes first, where stuff comes from is the next most important so you get FROM and JOIN. Filtering and aggregation are next, because they are often hinted at by the select list anyway, then sorting is the least important so it comes at the end.

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> What gets selected is generally the thing most cared about so it goes first

I disagree. When you're reading a query you often already know what you were trying to select, you just have a problem with a clause somewhere. This suggests that the select should go last, and this makes perfect sense as Haskell's comprehensions and C#'s LINQ are both way easier to work with than SQL.

You know what you want to select at the time of writing, but 3 months later when someone else needs to add column foo the first two thoughts are: is it already in the select and is it available to the select without more joins. I've rarely ever touched filtering or aggregating lines in an exiting query unless requirements completely changed, which is less common than wanting more values added to an existing query.

I disagree. I've used C#'s LINQ extensively, where the select is at the end and adding columns is trivial. It's a complete non-issue.

On the other hand having the select at the beginning has all kinds of problems for autocomplete, and syntactically obscures where you're selecting from and the clauses. I recommend you try LINQPad if you want experience with how much better this works:

https://www.linqpad.net/

> I've rarely ever touched filtering or aggregating lines in an exiting query unless requirements completely changed

Requirements change or bugs are discovered in the query. This is far more common than you imply.

As long as you have each operation in the expected order, then SQL syntax might make sense. The problem comes when you need something outside this template, e.g. a projection after an aggregation. The straightforward syntax becomes unnecessary complex and hard to read if you just venture a bit outside of the default template.

SQL syntax is like if all arithmetic expressions had to be addition followed by subtraction followed by multiplication. And if you didn't need to add anything you would just have to add 0.

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