|
|
|
|
|
|
by DKnoll
2821 days ago
|
|
|
Yours is a fair opinion and I can't come up with any reason why it's wrong. Personally I like it because it clearly separates keywords from objects (tables, columns, databases, etc). This is very much like the tabs vs. spaces debate. |
|
|
Certainly there are still far too many places people are writing/reading/interacting with SQL without the benefit of syntax highlighting, but we have the technology to solve that (and in many cases need to solve that; a lot of the places that SQL is embedded and the outer language has no idea about are opportunities for SQL injection attacks).
> This is very much like the tabs vs. spaces debate.
It's sadly worse than that. It's something like 60 years of momentum versus user/developer experience and readability concerns.
Despite my under-appreciated jokes that most SQL databases probably don't need to be shouted out to do their jobs (Oracle maybe being an exception. ;), it actually is a serious readability issue.
We have decades of research showing that people read/scan by word shape and that lower-case and mixed-case is far faster and easier to scan/read than all caps. 'from' has a more interesting and relatively more unique shape than 'FROM', making it easier to spot. (Especially in a monospace language where the outermost shape of all four letter all caps words is essentially the same width and height rectangle.) (If you try a syntax highlighting scheme that does something more interesting than bolding keywords, italicizing them with a good italic monospace font, the lower-case word 'from' can be almost beautiful and very easy to find. A nice benefit to syntax highlighters is that sort of variation is a personal option between you and your editors of choice.)
Typesetters have known for a long time that all caps is slower to read, and should be used sparingly because it exhausts readers.
Sentence-casing SQL statements benefits from the readability of all the English we read everywhere else.
I make jokes about shouting in our database queries, because it's sadly easier than changing more than a half-century of momentum in the status quo, but I do think that all-caps keywords in SQL statements is a huge papercut in dev productivity/ergonomics that we have the technology to fix but apparently not the interest/willpower.