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If SQL would just allow a trailing comma on the last column, none of this leading comma shit would be necessary. I still use trailing commas, because code reada

If SQL would just allow a trailing comma on the last column, none of this leading comma shit would be necessary. I still use trailing commas, because code readability is more important that writeability IMO, but the fact that I'm forced to sympathize with such an ugly shit sandwich is really frustrating. Can't sympathize with the clause alignment though. And I can't figure out why someone who does leading commas for editability would chose a style that forces you to use different indentation levels for different lines. Oh wait, you wanna make that join a left join? Time to go re-indenting my whole damn query... It's not even an improvement in readability...who actually reads text like it's a column format? It's not a spreadsheet.

nmstoker 5y ago
Yes, despite knowing how to do it right those damn comma issues always come up at the worst time and to add insult to injury they're reported by most of the tools I have available like they're totally insoluble to the computer (even though far more taxing things are routinely fixed automatically).
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  The code you get with a trailing comma is valid SQL just like the one you get without, and both have different meanings. The language is just too lenient with syntax, what is quite on the line for a "human legible" language from the late 70's and earlier 80's, but a really undesirable characteristic in practice. Unfortunately, nobody is doing a "better SQL", just radically different things that often not even support the same DB engines. And those have a real hard time getting popular, so we are stuck with the late 70's speculative innovations.