Comment by mnsc

This is a case where stating your opinion and credentials will make you sound really old and conservative so it will be easy to take cheap shots like "you are just afraid of change".

At my previous gig I worked for a decade with an application that meant creating and maintaining large hairy sql that was created to offload application logic to the database (_very_ original) And we used to talk about this "wrong order" often but I never once actually missed it. It was at the most a bit annoying when you jumped in a server to troubleshoot and you knew the two columns you were interested in and you could have saved two seconds. But when working with maintaining those massive queries it always felt good to have the projection up top because that is the end result and what the query is all about. I would not have liked if the method signature in eg Java was just the parameters and the return type was after the final brace. This analogy falls apart of course since params are all over the place but swapping things around wouldn't help.

So just go 'SELECT *...' and go back and expand later, I want my sql syntax "simple". /old developer