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Comment by hosteur | Hacker News Reader

SQL is incompatible with many types of autocompletion. For example columns in a select statement are not known here you write FROM. This alone justifies PRQL in my opinion.

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There are tools in most languages to deal with this. For example, take https://jawj.github.io/zapatos/. It introspects your database schema to generate types, and gives you autocompletion inside tagged template strings.

It's not a real problem in a practical sense. Yes, you have to write the FROM clause before autocomplete happens even though the SELECT must appear before it. Fortunately, however, text editiors used as IDEs allow for out-of-sequence code editing. You can just enter the FROM and move back to complete the SELECT.

It's like complaining that you have to know the variable name you're going to assign something to before you start writing the expression that will set the value.

  int y = x * 2;

The idea is to evaluate the expression and store it, but the expression doesn't actually read that way left-to-right. Wouldn't it make more sense for it to be:

  x * 2 assign to new int y;

Technically, that's written more in execution order. In practice it just isn't that big of a deal. It only trips up beginners.

Jetbrains tools (Datagrip, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm) deal well with this if you leave a placeholder column before FROM, and write the FROM part with proper joins. You can go back to the columns and autocomplete goes just fine. You can amend our extended any part and the autocomplete logic adapts well.

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