Why didn't the LINQ designers stick with using the way sql is written today?

Question

For example, why do you do this in LINQ

var products = from p in Products
               select p.Name;

when they could have done this:

var products = select p.Name from Products p;

Does the second offer some limitations in linq? Maybe the above examples are too simple to actually see why linq is written in one order and sql is written in another.

Answer 1

Because LINQ is not SQL. LINQ consists of a number of chained extension methods on IEnumerable<T> (when you are using the System.Linq namespace). The SQL like syntax is just a compiler trick to enable some syntactic sugar on chains of such query methods so it appears you can use queries looking a bit like SQL inside .NET languages. LINQ basically has nothing to do with SQL per se...

Answer 2

Because in order to have Intellisense in Visual Studio working with LINQ, it needs to know the tables first so that the editor can offer the programmer the list of columns to choose from. If you do it the SQL way and first you choose the columns, the editor can't really help you as it doesn't know which tables to look at.