Programming

13373 readers

1 users here now

All things programming and coding related. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Does anyone else struggle with compound words? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Was looking through some code today, and found something that highlights my biggest struggles in programming, it's compound words and casing. Had identifiers such as...

strikeThroughOffset
whitespaceWidth
lineSpacing
underlineOffset
outlineThickness

I can keep in mind "strike through off set", but then I struggle to remember, is it strikethrough or strikeThrough? What about Offset or OffSet? Why are offset, underline, and outline, all one word, but strikeThrough isn't? I think of it as one compound word, many people apparently do, but I guess someone who wrote this code doesn't.

Or... is this just a me problem? Does anyone else struggle with this sort of thing? Am I missing something or should I "just get good"? My best solution so far is just keep everything always lowercase, personally I find that more readable and memorable, but that's a lot to ask of literally every other programmer in the world...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I see this a lot with a significant portion of my colleagues, maybe around 30%.

Personally I don’t feel like it’s a big issue for me, but on the other hand I’ve been working mostly in Python (snake_casing) for the last six years.

That said I do see people having issues with it even in Python, so it’s not like snake casing cures the issue.

Always lowercase gets a downvote from me though.