First time seeing the from at the top of the query and I am not sure how I feel about it. It seems useful but I am so used to select...from.
I'm assuming it's more of a user preference like commas in front of the field instead of after field?
Yes it comes from a desire to impose intuition from other contexts onto something instead of building intuition with that thing.
SQL is a declarative language. The ordering of the statements was carefully thought through.
I will say it's harmless though, the clauses don't have any dependency in terms of meaning so it's fine to just allow them to be reordered in terms of the meaning of the query, but that's true of lots and lots of things in programming and just having a convention is usually better than allowing anything.
For example, you could totally allow this to be legal:
def
for x in whatever:
print(x)
print_whatever(whatever):
I think you see this all the time, people try to impose their own comfort onto things for no actual improvement.
No, it comes from wanting to make autocompletion easier and to make variable scoping/method ordering make sense within LINQ. It is an actual improvement in this regard.
LINQ popularized it and others followed. It does what it says.
Btw: saying that "people try to impose their own comfort" is uncalled for.
In that case you are just objectively incorrect, you can build a far, far more efficient autocomplete in the standard query order. I will guess something like half as many keystrokes to type the same select and from clauses. You are imagining a very niave autocomplete that can only guess columns after it knows the tables, but in reality you can guess most of the columns, including the first one, the tables, and the aliases. Names in dbs are incredibly sparse, and duplicate names don't make autocomplete less effective.
If you are right about why they did it its even dumber than my reason, they are changing a language grammar to let them make a much worse solution to the same problem.
You can use any variation of DuckDB valid syntax that you want! I prefer to put from first just because I think it's better, but Instant SQL works with traditional select __ from __ queries.