Sure, I forgot the self-join case. In my experience these are a minority of joins, but definitely. In postgres at least, a lot of self-joins can be solved wit

Sure, I forgot the self-join case. In my experience these are a minority of joins, but definitely. In postgres at least, a lot of self-joins can be solved with a DISTINCT ON instead. Sub-selection with a FROM clause, yeah, those definitely need names. But those don't have perfectly good names that everybody already knows, whereas tables do. If you're maintaining somebody's code and they declare foo_bar = 10 I think it'd be pretty strange to ever consider writing fb = foo_bar just because you find foo_bar too long to write or something.