entering the lists against CamelCase

[John Benson]

I never cared for CamelCase because a lot of words in English are compounds,
and remembering the right CamelCase rendition of them gets difficult. For
example, an object attribute named

HaveAMerryChristmas

isn't too hard, but what about deciding between

HaveAGoodWeekend

and

HaveAGoodWeekEnd?

I think that most native English speakers would automatically chose the
former, but others might tend to misremember the latter.

And what about LaunchGoodyearBlimp versus LaunchGoodYearBlimp? A person
without specific knowledge of the Goodyear company might easily fall into
the error of choosing the latter. I'm sure that even better examples could
be found, given billable time.

As to the relative abundance of CamelCase, I've seen a potful of it. I
remember seeing it in the Macintosh API, and it's all over Windows. I've
also seen a lot of mostly-lowercase code, too, so in my experience you can't
decide the case (pun intended) on the basis of popularity.

I think CamelCase is a reaction against an unrelieved boredom with
uppercase-only terminals and printer chains. When terminals and printers
could do both upper- and lower-case glyphs, one group went almost all
lowercase (except for C globals and object-like macros ) and another group
went CamelCase, both in reaction against the former tyranny of uppercase. A
holdout was the lone COBOL programmer I knew who refused to disengage her
caps lock key in an effort to preserve the wierdly uncool all-uppercase
style of old COBOL listings.

Although I'm tempted to claim that all the cool guys and gals went mostly
lowercase because that's my personal preference, I'm actually grateful for
all the CamelCased good stuff available to me through Python.

Case Dismissed!

 

[Erik Max Francis]

... what about deciding between

HaveAGoodWeekend

and

HaveAGoodWeekEnd? ...
And what about LaunchGoodyearBlimp versus LaunchGoodYearBlimp? A
person
without specific knowledge of the Goodyear company might easily fall
into
the error of choosing the latter. I'm sure that even better examples
could
be found, given billable time.

If this is really your biggest problem in programming, I'd say that
you're in fantastic shape. Seriously.

 

[John Roth]

I never cared for CamelCase because a lot of words in English are compounds,
and remembering the right CamelCase rendition of them gets difficult.

[snip]

Well, having worked in monocased languages, I find that
the biggest problem with them is the inability to tell where
word breaks are without a clue. Capitalization is one such
clue, underscores are another. The hyphens you find all over
COBOL programs are a third. All of these suffer from the
ambiguity problem you mention.

The best solution I know of for the ambiguity problem is to
create a lexicon for a system rather than simply creating names
as they swim up from the depths of the creative unconcious.

John Roth