Once I was checking somebody’s code against a coding style and asked him why he capitalised a certain identifier that wasn’t a type. His reply was along these lines: This word is a German noun. In the German language all nouns are capitalised. It is better to have the identifier look like the real word, because it uses less cognitive resources. Your IDE can tell you about the nature of the identifier. Your name should only reflect how it is used.
I kinda liked the idea (and maybe forced him to conform to the rule, I don’t remember). In the end I’ve come to appreciate, when you can use identifiers that really look like normal text.
eat_French_cheese(new Le_Curé_Nantais());
{Not a memory leak - the cheese is properly consumed/destroyed by fnc}
And I hate if the compiler allows to have different identifiers that only differ in case. E.g. “RailsExpr” and “railSexPR” shouldn’t be allowed coexist in the same code. (Neither should indentation with tabs and indentation with space coexist in the same file).
Once I was checking somebody’s code against a coding style and asked him why he capitalised a certain identifier that wasn’t a type. His reply was along these lines: This word is a German noun. In the German language all nouns are capitalised. It is better to have the identifier look like the real word, because it uses less cognitive resources. Your IDE can tell you about the nature of the identifier. Your name should only reflect how it is used.
I kinda liked the idea (and maybe forced him to conform to the rule, I don’t remember). In the end I’ve come to appreciate, when you can use identifiers that really look like normal text.
And I hate if the compiler allows to have different identifiers that only differ in case. E.g. “RailsExpr” and “railSexPR” shouldn’t be allowed coexist in the same code. (Neither should indentation with tabs and indentation with space coexist in the same file).