11–20 of 272 posts
I feel like this ship has sailed. SQL has been around for more than 50 years and everyone who needs to generate it has already put that extra `if` statement in to suppress trailing commas. What annoys me far more often is the lack of support for trailing commas in JSON.
This, 100%! And the lack of comments.
I feel the problem. When coding (not only in SQL) you often have to add something to the end of a list, and it is annoying that the end of the list is always special. You can't just copy some line and move it there. Also when moving things around you always have to take extra care at the end. So, my solution for this was always SELECT a , b , c FROM ... instead of: SELECT a, b, c, -- people want to allow trailing com…
SELECT
a,
b,
c,
FROM ...
?I feel the problem. When coding (not only in SQL) you often have to add something to the end of a list, and it is annoying that the end of the list is always special. You can't just copy some line and move it there. Also when moving things around you always have to take extra care at the end. So, my solution for this was always SELECT a , b , c FROM ... instead of: SELECT a, b, c, -- people want to allow trailing com…
You have simply moved the "special" entry to the beginning rather than the end.
Side remark: I've noticed that when it comes to code formatting and grammar it's almost like there are broadly two camps. There are some instances of code formatting that involve something "clever". Your example of leading commas above for example. Another example is code ligatures. It's as if there's a dividing line of taste here where one either feels delight at the clever twist, or the total opposite, rarely anything in between. I happen to dislike these kinds of things (and particularly loathe code ligatures) but it is often hard to justify exactly why beyond taste.
Code ligature thing has something to do with just seeing the characters that are actually there rather than a smokescreen, which IMO impedes editability because I can't place the cursor half-way through a ligature and so on. But it's more than that -- you could fix those functional issues and I'll still dislike them.
I feel the problem. When coding (not only in SQL) you often have to add something to the end of a list, and it is annoying that the end of the list is always special. You can't just copy some line and move it there. Also when moving things around you always have to take extra care at the end. So, my solution for this was always SELECT a , b , c FROM ... instead of: SELECT a, b, c, -- people want to allow trailing com…
I feel like this ship has sailed. SQL has been around for more than 50 years and everyone who needs to generate it has already put that extra `if` statement in to suppress trailing commas. What annoys me far more often is the lack of support for trailing commas in JSON.
Ugh. Why? To make copy/paste programming easier? To make query generation easier? When you're writing code to generate queries, it's worth doing it right. Just about every programming language has an easy way to take an array of strings and add a separator between each element. Like PHP's implode: implode(', ', ['foo', 'bar', 'baz']) == 'foo, bar, baz'. Every time I see a trailing comma, I think "is this a bug? did t…
During prototyping, I'm frequently adding and removing entries from lists, or change their order. It's really annoying when you have to update the commas afterwards. Much nicer dev experience when ever entry ends with a comma, and you can juggle them around at will.
Unless I change the first column, no problem.
On the downside, does this make it easier to write code that is vulnerable to command injection, because it is easier to append a bunch of statements passed as input?
For the WHERE clause, if i happen to be programatically appending conditions, i'll start with `WHERE true` so i don't need to consider if i'm appending the first condition (no AND/OR/NOT etc.) or a later condition (required AND/OR/NOT etc.). A decent query planner should ignore the fixed value.
I feel the problem. When coding (not only in SQL) you often have to add something to the end of a list, and it is annoying that the end of the list is always special. You can't just copy some line and move it there. Also when moving things around you always have to take extra care at the end. So, my solution for this was always SELECT a , b , c FROM ... instead of: SELECT a, b, c, -- people want to allow trailing com…
, b
, c
FROM ...
SELECT a, b, c FROM ...