OSNews

I think the Apple iWhatever is distinct enough from any convention. It's more of a marketing/identity thing than a readability solution.

I hope Apple will name their tablet something modern, and not just something boring like iPad, iTablet or whatever.

... that's another thing, perhaps it's just me, but Apple has a real hard time naming things that sound appealing to me, that aren't operating systems that is.

It's either iBoring, or some nebulous thing like "Time Machine" or "Boot Camp". They sound more like bad puns and play-on-words than communicative titles of technologies.

NeXT anyone?

I prefer programming languages with do_not_pass_go_or_collect_200_dollars() method name conventions.

Another annoyance are wiki engines that automatically linkify CamelCase words.

The language itself is called Smalltalk, though. Not SmallTalk as too many seem to think. The correct capitalization just reads better in my opinion, and apparently also in that of the language designers.

I was about to post that Greek, Hebrew and Latin used all the same case ...

Besides our old variables in BASIC and FORTRAN were more like BOC (for something like bufferOverflowCounter) or if verbosity was encouraged, BOCTR. Never more than six characters in the OLD days.

Actually, to this day when I think I can get away with it I use 6 char. var. names.

Ah well... that reminds me that I must get back to work. I have dallied too long and not finished my Sprint in time.

Not SmallTalk but Turning long ago in school if not VB and VC afterward; txtName, varName, funcDoesThingy(). I'd suggest that the programming teacher may have learned it from SmallTalk but she was barely keeping up with course book she was reading from. (nice teacher, just not a coder)

After languages (like RPG, older versions) required identifiers to reside in a certain position within the line (e. g. colums 2 - 6 for this and that, column 7 for something else), the space character has been introduced as a statement separator. Later on, the space character and the tab character were means of "pretty coding"; in some languages, they even are a syntactic element today.



The easyness of _ depends on its place on the keyboard, and this depends on the keyboard layout. The german layout, for example, places _ where ? is on the english / US one, this means it's exactly left to the right shift key. But because most programmers are used to the english / US layout, camel case (camelCase?) has been so widely adopted, I think.

According to reading: I agree that myNiceFunction() and my_nice_function() are relatively equal. A problem can arise when you follow conventions that suggest the case for certain text elements within the source code, such as in C: full UPPERCASE for #define macros, beginning with a Capital for enums (I'm not sure about this, but I think I remember that I read that somewhere) and regular lowercase for all other identifiers.

Using _ instead of space gives the advantage of automatic parsing: For example, function names with _ can be easily found and turned into documentation, simply by replacing the _ by a ' ' (a literal space). It's not that easy with camel case where the end of one word has to be determined by the case of the letter, then turning the letter into lowercase again and preceeding it by a ' '. If you now have scripting tools in mind, you recognize that automatically processing _ is much easier.

Finally, just giving a very individual opinion: I mostly use the_underscore_convention for longer identifiers. If the identifiers get really too long, I shorten them and give a comment about what the abbreviation stands for, sviftdft() /* some very interesting function that does funny things */. But in the past, I even wrote right away, without capitalizing the beginning of a word, justallinone, which I today would consider a quite bad style. But much better than my Pascal days, without spaces and cases and everything, init;bk(0);setpicardcolor(x0+x1+xk+ax(rs(r,10,12),qq[x])+q,f[q[ni],kk[ i+1]); - just plain terrible... :-)

if we follow the .NET conventions, it would be

OsNews


and looks nice

Well, actually it would be OSNews.

Source:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229043.aspx

you're right, sorry.

You must be killed.

I thing it should be TB... short for ThomsBlog.com.

JUST KIDDING Thom!

Actually the last 5 or 6 articles have been decent.

Although it is a complete off-topic (sorry), I must say that I'm really put off when I see the word "I" throughout the whole article. It is OK to present the editor's view, but in a separate section. Otherwise it does look like a blog post.

Despite the fact that Thom sometimes get carried away and writes very biased articles, I think that he is doing a very good job. Besides, you cannot always do your best when you're writing 90% of the articles. I wish there were more editors actively involved.

I'd volunteer but honestly, if I were to write articles it would take me a week at a time, because I'd want to go over it again and again to make sure the content makes sense, is valid, etc... because I know all of you people reading OSNews would pick it apart.

Plus I'd probably get all defensive about my articles.

Agreed,

The rational on this is because compilers use identifier names [variables, classes, functions, methods, etc.] as an entity that just contains alphanumerical characters and a reduced number of symbols.

Space is generally treated as a separator, so, if a variable is called "my salary" instead of "mySalary" would create ambiguity for the compiler: "what is the variable name? 'my'? if the variable name is 'my'... what the hell is 'salary' here? I do not know a reserved word called 'salary' and after the variable 'my' I expect an operator or a function name to invoke"... or something like that

Quite easy: "my" is the (data)type of "salary". :-)

The biggest kudos I give to Qt is their non strict camel casedness of their class methods.

My knee jerk reaction is to look at someone's code with CamelCased methods and immediately identify "oh, they must be another windows programmer".

I'm not sure Microsoft used Camel Case all that much until .NET - their legacy APIs (DOS, Win32, etc.) are full of Hungarian Notation, which they had a great deal in promoting. Basic/VBasic may be a different issue though.

Qt, on the other hand, has been using CamelCase for longer than .NET has been around; as have many others.

Actually, the accepted definition of CameCase encompasses both forms ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase

I wonder how well it would work to make . a valid character for entity names, and not use it for any operators, in a language? Then you could get away with much less mod key use.

Without entirely agreeing with you, I do think Thom at least implies something wrong when he says, For the first time, reading became something you could do in silence, as a private thing. (emphasis added) Silent reading as a private behavior most definitely existed in Imperial Rome, for example but it was usually done by moving one's lips. Augustine of Hippo, in the Confessions, relates the amazement of him and some friends when they came to meet Ambrose of Milan and found him reading silently. That said, Augustine was a highly educated and cultured man, so this also implies that Thom isn't far off the mark.

On the other hand, Thom is definitely wrong about spaces between words. Spaces don't appear in nearly any writing before the Romans and Greeks (in fact, I can't find any reference to spaces in writing before them). To the contrary, the Romans specifically invented a word divider that everyone else lacked, called the interpunct.

See more fully here:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Re...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_divider

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpunct

Further, Greeks did use spacing and punctuation in earlier than the 8th century, and it wasn't added in for the monks - it was added in for people whose second language was Greek. Prior to that there was (i) no spacing, (ii) no sentence punctuation, and (iii) no breathing marks.

Allthoug spaces are allowed in file names in many file system definitiions, it's obvious that spaces usually are the delimiter character in dialog shells and scripting tools. If file names contain spaces, there's always a need in scripts to include proper quoting, because a space could keep a program from working.

There are other characters that are allowed in file names. You actually *can* use them. But should you?

someFotos of Jim & Bob @ the ``OS" convention "booyah!" in Blödmanntown \ Núßbaumlænd / near Jane's farm[1].JPG

Imagine the fun when you have tons of such file names and you have to script something for them... :-)

As I mentioned before, I prefer the underscore character, even in file names. And I don't use umlauts, eszett ligatures or any possibly special character in them, just [a-zA-Z0-9] and _ - , and #. This has the advantage that file names are readable under any circumstances (no special character map required, no support for UTF-8 needed); this is an essential criterium especially for data recovery needs, where following such a "minimal approach" convention can save you some trouble.

The logo has always been like that, since 1997 http://www.osnews.com/1997osnews/

"OSnews" makes the word "news" more readable, where as "OSNews" puts more impact on "OSN" with some trailing letters. "OS News" is fine, because the N does not mess with the "OS". Basically I’m concerned that the "OS" part should be stressed, and "OSN…" de-stresses that.

Thom won’t have it because he is passionate about language and doesn’t like churlish web 2.0-isms AFAIK. Not that I do either (can’t stand awkward domain hacks), I just think the lowercase "n" looks nicer and helps to keep OS as O.S.

David doesn’t seem to mind either way, which doesn’t help separate the scrapping school boys.

Off topic i know, but how good is this quote from the above link :



Edited 2009-12-03 12:34 UTC

Urgh.

K&R!

Allman FTW!

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (acronym: ASCII; pronounced /ˈæski/, ASS-kee)

I'd agree with "time" and "kiss" though unless somehow being used for a specific acronym. If it's done intentionally for emphasis then someone's parents needs take there keyboard away for a while.

I agree, also .NET should be spelled out Dot-Net.

I know where it comes from, but it is still camel case - just with a different origin. More tolerable, if you will.

Yes, I worded that wrong. What I meant to say was not "because", but something else.

"Camel case quickly took off from the 1950s onwards, [later on] mostly because of the rise of computing."

Or something like that. Degree in English or no, I still mess up .

I dunno. I was born in 1963. And I never even got to touch a computer until I was 16. And that was far earlier than most people of the time. Computers were very much "glass room" items, and most people's interaction with computers was limited to those puch card electric bills we got that told us not to spindle, fold, or mutilate.

It was not until the mid to late 80s, at the earliest, that many people really interacted with computers. And even then, not in a way that would expose them to camel case.

It seems to me that even today it would be a stretch to associate the use of camel case in marketing, etc. with its coincidental use in computing. And claiming it was having an effect back in the 50's seems *way* beyond the pale.

I almost hate to say this. But this is one time that I really do have to ask myself, "What is this doing on OSnews?".

Edit: Which is not to say that it has not sparked some interesting conversion. I knew that the concept of "zero" was a relative late-comer. But I'd never even thought about the "Space" character as being an innovation.

Edited 2009-12-03 16:26 UTC

Those were present in German, too, especially in the "Fraktur" font families. A "round S" (that looks like the s we know) indicated the end of a word, while the "long S" (that looks quite like a f, but without the horizontal line) was used inside words. This was helpful because the german language knows concatenated words (while english language just puts words after another with a space to create a combined meaning).

Example:
Wachstube (Wachs-Tube) = the wax tube
Wachftube (Wach-Stube) = the guard room

Without the obsolated "long s", both words look the same.

Another example is the use of the Eszett ligature (it's not a letter!) to indicate that a non-truncatable ss is present. This of course indicates the end of a word, or the end of a word part, and makes reading easier, especially when the next word part begins with another s.

Example:
Meßgerät = the measuring device
Meßstrecke = the measuring line (compare: Messstrecke)

The Eszett ligature, because it IS a "long s" followed by a "round s", exactly looks like the combination of f and s - some good printing fonts even show this.

(Note that I've abused the letter f in my examples to represent the "long s" - it's not a literal f, of course.)

In some regards... camel case is something like the german concatenated noun; long words consisting of shorter words. In some middle-age dated ancestors of today's German, the hyphen has been used to indicate the "gap" between word parts, and due to the ongoing "spelling reforms", this idea is revived again, such as "Ein-Bett-Zimmer" instead of "Einbettzimmer" (one bed room), but it's used completely arbitrary and without any logical decision, such as "Autobahnraststätte", "Autobahn-Raststätte", "Auto-Bahnraststätte" or "Autobahnrast-Stätte" (highway rest stop).



So it's NEWSos, then? :-)

Hebrew has final forms for k/ch, ts, m, n, p/f. That's about a quarter of its alphabet.
I don't see the morphological interaction there, perhaps others do. Both -im and -in are plural endings, so that is convenient.
There are still hieroglyphs visible in our own Latin alphabet, by the way.