SQL used to actively promote Yoda conditions when you needed to compare a constant with the result of a subquery: select stuff from foo where 500 = ( select sum(cost) from bar where id = 1 ); It used to be that you simply couldn’t write the above WHERE expression in non-Yoda form, but things seem to have improved in recent years (e.g., the non-Yoda form now works in both Oracle and PostgreSQL). Why? Because that’s what the standard said. Orthogonal language design? Who needs that?