i say that because i've seen people post problems on forums where the "comma style" join was the cause of the problem -- there are several problems, and i won't go into them, i'll just say that they do come up regularly

as for readable, sorry, i have to disagree -- the explicit JOIN syntax is way more readable, as it isolates each joined table and clearly indicates the join conditions for that table alone

the "leading comma" convention for lists of columns, however, is a separate issue, and is purely a matter of style -- syntactically it is equivalent, but the effect on maintenance (adding or removing columns from the list) is remarkable, at least in my opinion