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Comment by wiredfool | Hacker News Reader

I find all caps identifiers wind up just looking like interchangeable blocks, where lowercase have word shapes. So all caps just slows down my reading.

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I feel similarly and I also have friends with Dyslexia with even stronger opinions on it. All caps in addition to being "shouting" to my ancient internet-using brain (and thus rude in most cases), creates big similar rectangular blocks as word shapes and is such a big speed bump to reading speed for everyone (whether or not they notice it). For some of my friends with Dyslexia that have a huge tough time with word shapes at the best of times, all caps can be a hard stop "cannot read" blocker for them. They say it is like trying to read a redacted document where someone just made rectangular black marker cross outs.

Personally, given SQL's intended similarity to English, I find that I like English "sentence case" for it, with the opening keyword starting with a capital letter and nearly every remaining letter lower case (except for Proper Nouns, the truly case-sensitive parts of SQL like table names). Sentence case has been helpful to me in the past in spotting things like missing semicolons in dialects like Postgres' that require them, and/or near keywords like `Merge` that require them or helping to visually make sure the `select` under a `Merge` is intended as a clause rather than starting a new "sentence".

> I find that I like English "sentence case" for it,

I could go either way, but if you want to go back and modify a query, this makes it more difficult for me. I just use a block syntax for my queries:

    SELECT   *
    FROM     the_table
    WHERE    some_column = 12
    AND      other_column IS NOT NULL
    ORDER BY order_column;

It's a bit of a "Why not both?" situation, I think? You can have blocks and sentence case:

    Select   *
    from     the_table
    where    some_column = 12
    and      other_column is not null
    order by order_column;

That seems so much more readable to me. As I said, that single capital `S` in the outermost "select" has come in surprisingly handy in my experience when scanning through a collection of statements or a transaction or a stored procedure or even just a statement with a bunch of nested sub-selects. It's an interesting advantage I find over "all lower case" or "all upper case" keywords.

your example is less readable for me. not by a lot, but still.

the other example has the commands, in caps, on the left and the values on the right, in lowercase. your example removes one of those aspects and makes everything lowercase. my brain can ignore all-caps stuff, as these are just commands and the things i actually care about mostly are the values.

but i mean, in the end, it's just preferences. if you write SQL-queries, #1 is that you understand them well :)

> your example is less readable for me. not by a lot, but still

Agree, but I wonder how much of that is just the lack of colouring. My brain is suuuuper hard wired to expect all the special keywords to be identified that way as well as by case.

Mostly I'm a caps guy because my ahk scripts expand text like "ssf","w" and "gb"* to be the way I learned to write them at first.

   SELECT *
     FROM the_table
    WHERE some_column = 12
      AND other_column IS NOT NULL
 ORDER BY order_column;

I usually don't bother with ALL-CAP keywords.

I use a similar structure but without column alignment.

  SELECT
    a,
    b
  FROM t1
  JOIN t2 ON …
  WHERE cond1
    AND cond2
  ORDER/GROUP/HAVING etc

This is the way, everyone else is wrong.

I prefer lower case for my personal legibility reasons and it seems like a prettyfier should be able to adjust to that user’s preference. It’s not a team sport for me so I never had a conflict of styles other than converting public code samples to match my way.

I've always found it funny that SQL was designed the way it is to be as close to natural English as possible, but then they went ahead and made everything all-caps

Some old terminals didn't have lower case. Like 1960s era

Also sql editors like datagrip color the sql syntax very well.

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