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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

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amelius·

Germans capitalize their nouns in normal language. I wonder what effect that has on their code.

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We code in english, but it does make UpperCamelCase more natural for us.

Do nouns feel more intense and heavy than other words, like they dofor English speakers?

Or are capital letters so common that they don't feel heavy?

Of course it's difficult to compare if they feel maybe a bit less heavy for me than for English speakers, but as a German capital letters do indeed feel heavy for me, as well.

Not sure what you mean - are you asking about nouns, or proper nouns?

Nouns are capitalized in German, not other random words. But yes, both proper nouns and all other nouns feel heavier than other words.

We mostly use (bad) English in programming contexts.

I worked on the code bases of 6 German speaking companies and they were all in English.

Actually, for me it's the other way round. Sometimes I write german words like "BratwurstBratGerät" (UpperCamelCase)

Can you explain this phrase to a non German speaker? I think ”bratwurst brat gerät” very roughly translates to “bratwurst roasting device” which makes me think of kabab-case instead of UpperCamelCase. German phrases are usually pretty intuitive but I don’t understand this one at all.

Germans write those compound words with "German casing", like this: "Bratwurstbratgerät" [1]. It is just a roaster for bratwursts. In other languages like english sometimes compound words are kebab cased, like yes. [2]

Btw, for kebabs you probably want a Dönnergrill :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_(linguistics)#Germani...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound

It makes sense if you consider how sausages made from camels can be cooked to get a nice smoky flavour.

Shouldn't that be considered sausage casing?

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