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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

> you usually put it in the line with the SELECT.

No, you usually don't. That would "bury" the first field so you don't immediately see it if you quickly glance at the code. I'll admit I was a bit surprised when I saw a fully formatted SQL query but it does look much better:

   SELECT
      a,
      b,
      c,
      d
   FROM
      Customers
   ORDER BY
      b,
      c DESC

Edit: I've just seen other comments here suggesting you return an extra "pad" value at the start so you can use leading commas without "losing" the first value visually. I hardly know where to start with that. It transmits more data on the wire and, to my eyes, looks horrific. That level of hackery is proof, as if it were needed, of how badly needed trailing commas are.

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Any new style will look bad, simply because it is new to us. But you quickly get used to it.

After that, it is about minimizing errors. Leading commas minimize errors, and is a style that is portable across databases.

> Any new style will look bad, simply because it is new to us.

I agree that new styles and syntaxes can take some getting used to. When I went from Pascal to C, braces seemed awful but I now think punctuation is much clearer than words for delimiting blocks.

But the discussion here is about whether to introduce a new clearer style. Taken on this context, your comment amounts to defending any existing syntax, no matter how horrific, because you'll get used to it eventually.

> But the discussion here is about whether to introduce a new clearer style. Taken on this context, your comment amounts to defending any existing syntax, no matter how horrific, because you'll get used to it eventually.

No, I'm not defending any existing syntax.

As I said, it is about minimizing errors. You can get used to anything. But some styles and syntaxes are more error-prone than others. Leading commas in SQL is less error-prone, and therefore is preferred. No matter what your initial aesthetic impression. Allowing extra trailing commas is not portable, and therefore will increase errors if you come to rely on it then move between databases. So if the feature is provided, I will still be slow to adopt it into my style.

I always do this. There's usually one field that you can put at the start that never changes. But the field at the end will keep changing as you add more fields to the SELECT list.

   SELECT
      a
      ,b
      ,c
      ,d
   FROM
      Customers
   ORDER BY
      b
      ,c DESC

it is a trade-off

reordering, insertions and deletions much easier within the IDE as you’re manipulating lines as a whole. focus maintained while you are in the zone or tired is the biggest gain

at the cost of slightly uglier code and a miniscule… truly miniscule wire overhead.

other decisions will have much larger wire impact, say choosing a column wider than necessary

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