Jordan2d ago
Every now and then people share languages with very minimal or very uniform syntax (think Lisp, or Haskell, or Forth) and go "look, all the noise is gone". And to each their own, and familiarity goes a long way, but I think I've pinned down my feelings about it, which is "that wasn't noise, that was signal; I was using as scaffolding when reading the code and now I have to wade through every token linearly".
Show threadPeter Hosey2d ago

@jrose I've been thinking about this, or something related, in the context of SQL—a language that largely favors keywords over punctuation—which I habitually write in the classic SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE baz style, and which some of my colleagues write in all lowercase.

The difference, I think, is syntax highlighting, which they all learned with and take for granted. The uppercase keywords originally made up for the lack of that.

Show threadChris Adams2d ago

@boredzo @jrose “why are the old people always shouting at the database?”

I think you especially have a point for the multi-decade gap between syntax highlighting being available and it being something you could count on having on a remote terminal session, query tool not oriented at developers, etc.

Show threadIrenes (many)2d ago

@acdha @boredzo @jrose haha yeah we actually went and mandated capitalized keywords for SQL in the style guide at work, and the young people have been willing to go along with it, for which we thank them (we must have established trust somehow....)

but we gave a lot of thought to whether it was the right thing to do

Show threadIrenes (many)
@acdha @boredzo @jrose what it came down to for us was that we don't know of an editor that does a good job of highlighting SQL that appears within other languages, and that's a thing we do constantly
Mar 21 at 12:38amWeb
Show threadWillow at large2d ago
@ireneista @acdha @boredzo @jrose this is part of why I put all my SQL strings in a Jinja module and access them like
await conn.execute(self.queries.user_sessions(), user_id)
or whatever
Show threadIrenes (many)2d ago
@Willow @acdha @boredzo @jrose valid approach, of course