[henrydark]

I get the sentiment, but personally I can easily imagine myself writing an autocompleter that would work fine with select before from. (I don't write much sql so I don't)

Just to clarify, my point is that when we do write sql most of us start by writing the from part, and even if we didn't I can just offer all columns from all tables I know about with some heuristic for their order when autocompleting in the select part.