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…
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.