| I don't bother with this but instead try to keep column names alphabetical. I try to do the same thing in other languages with property names, etc. This gives greater stability in version control, as it removes the temptation to change the order for subjective reasons. Even better if it can be automated with linting. This "fix" only helps with the case where new items are inserted at the end. By using alphabetic ordering you increase the chances that a new item will be inserted at the beginning or the middle, in which case it makes no difference where you put the commas. It only really helps at all because inserting new items at the end is common, whereas removing items from the start is rare, at least in SQL (all it really does is displace the dangling comma problem from the former case to the latter). However, always inserting new items at the end tends to lead to unintuitive ordering, which in turn leads to additional VCS churn when that becomes seen as technical debt. Commas at the start does give objectively better readability in one sense: it ensures they are aligned vertically. That makes it easier to spot errors at a glance. You might call this "ease of formal reviewability". However, in practice it seems to be worse for general readability, for the entirely subjective reason you already pointed to. Since code is typically read more often than it is written, it's important to optimise for that first. Since an error here will always cause a hard fail, it falls into a different category than say, omitting braces in a C-style if statement, which can introduce subtle bugs through bad merges. In the latter case, ease of formal reviewability has to take precedence over subjective aesthetics. |