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Yep. Same here. I find screaming one's reserved words far more distracting than the highlighting helps. Another SQL habit that seems to far more annoying than

by __jal 10y ago

Yep. Same here. I find screaming one's reserved words far more distracting than the highlighting helps. Another SQL habit that seems to far more annoying than helpful is putting commas at the start of next line. Great, they line up. Did you know that publishers have a term for vertical patterns in blocks of text? They're called 'rivers', and one generally attempts to avoid them, because they're visually distracting.

blowski 10y ago
One developer's 'river' is another's 'grid'. Being able to scan down quickly makes it easier to compare lines against each other. That's not something you do when reading a novel or a newspaper article, but it's something you do all the time when reading code.
- __jal 10y ago
  Maybe I'm a weirdo. I find it massively distracting. About the only time column-alignment is helpful is when scanning for typos, but that's handled pretty capably in other ways by most editors more sophisticated than Text Edit.
gbog 10y ago
I think "rivers" are not the same. if the same as in edition of books in French, rivers are those unwanted "paths" your eye sees floating downwards inside the rectangle of words that makes a page. They come out of randomness, when whitespaces happen to draw a negative path. It has to be corrected by slightly modifying the whitespaces between some words. AFAIK this is done manually and is one reason for book edition to be done by humans. In short, it has nothing to do with purposeful perfect vertical alignment in code.
- __jal 10y ago
  When I worked in magazine production (90s, California) we used the term for both whitespace and other patterns. Other patterns are a lot less common, because whitespace is the most common "character", but they happen.
irrational 10y ago
I used to agree with you about putting commas at the beginning of lines, but now I've changed my mind. By putting the commas at the beginning of lines it becomes much easier to do dynamic sql and to be able to add remove select statements without having to check the ends of the lines to make sure the last line does not have a trailing comma and to make sure the preceding lines each does have the requisite comma.

by __jal 10y ago

blowski 10y ago

One developer's 'river' is another's 'grid'. Being able to scan down quickly makes it easier to compare lines against each other. That's not something you do when reading a novel or a newspaper article, but it's something you do all the time when reading code.

__jal 10y ago
Maybe I'm a weirdo. I find it massively distracting. About the only time column-alignment is helpful is when scanning for typos, but that's handled pretty capably in other ways by most editors more sophisticated than Text Edit.

gbog 10y ago

I think "rivers" are not the same. if the same as in edition of books in French, rivers are those unwanted "paths" your eye sees floating downwards inside the rectangle of words that makes a page. They come out of randomness, when whitespaces happen to draw a negative path. It has to be corrected by slightly modifying the whitespaces between some words. AFAIK this is done manually and is one reason for book edition to be done by humans. In short, it has nothing to do with purposeful perfect vertical alignment in code.

__jal 10y ago
When I worked in magazine production (90s, California) we used the term for both whitespace and other patterns. Other patterns are a lot less common, because whitespace is the most common "character", but they happen.

irrational 10y ago

I used to agree with you about putting commas at the beginning of lines, but now I've changed my mind. By putting the commas at the beginning of lines it becomes much easier to do dynamic sql and to be able to add remove select statements without having to check the ends of the lines to make sure the last line does not have a trailing comma and to make sure the preceding lines each does have the requisite comma.