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entering the lists against CamelCase

John Benson jsbenson at bensonsystems.com
Sun Dec 7 17:50:55 EST 2003 
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!
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