Every time SQL is mentioned on HN someone comes to complain about FROM coming after SELECT. I use SQL every day and not a single time have I found reason to complain about it. Can you give a bit more detail about what's wrong with it being like it is ?

EDIT : thanks all for your reply. I now understand that it is an IDE related thing not something fundamental to the language.

If you exploring a set of tables you have never touched before, it really neat if you could just type in:

FROM tablename t SELECT t.

and some form of autocomplete mechanism, either prefills all the column names from table "t" or suggests the list of columns and/or types associated with it.

This is much better than having to: 1. Run a SELECT with LIMIT statement just to get an idea of the layout. 2. Point and click through the IDE treeview.

Honestly, I don't think it helps a whole lot beyond this functionality, but I can see why folks who are accustomed to thinking in functional pipelines (from -> select -> map -> filter -> collect) can prefer this way of querying.

I think PRQL is one attempt at building something this way.[1]

[1]. https://github.com/prql/prql