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Comment by lonelappde | Hacker News Reader

Underscore is a chord key. That's it's main flaw, along with taking up an extra character of our precious 80-char budget.

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Uppercase letters are chord keys as well.

And so are every upper-case letter. And if you want, you can modify your keyboard layout to swap the - and _ and no longer have to reach for the shift key at all.

(I'll just laugh at the argument that underscores causes problem with line width limitations.)

I prefer the underscore style as I find the names more legible, it's easier to see where each particle starts and ends. It's particularly evident when using acronyms: read_JPEG_image is much more legible than ReadJPEGImage. Many style guide resort to lower-casing acronym due to that: ReadJpegImage.

On a tangent: Emacs has a venerable minor mode called "glasses-mode" that inserts visual underscores whenever the case changes in the middle of a word. So "readJPEGFile" is displayed on screen as "read_JPEG_File". (This is just a display trick, the file itself is not modified.) It can be handy for reading denseCamelCaseCode, esp. when your eyes are tired.

For what it's worth, I think this is why kebab-case originally became popular in lisp-land. We used it significantly in our JS style guide at $PREVIOUS_FIRM.

I suspect the real reason is the same reason why you wrote "kebab-case" and "lisp-land" and not "kebab_case" and "lisp_land".

The main flaw is that the underscore is not actually a character in the English typographical language; it's a typewriter feature for going back and underlining text.

When used for joining words, it looks terrible, like a hyphen that has lost its suspenders and fallen to the floor.

I would write kebab case even if hyphen required the shift, and underscore didn't.

`kebab-case` isn't perfect. It works just fine in a prefix notated language such as LISP, but less so in an infix language. I suppose you could require significant whitespace to differentiate `a-b` from `a - b`, but even that is a little counterintuitive to read. `snake_case` is popular in both Python and Ruby, and canonical in the former. Moreover, it's canonical in SQL. Frankly, even though I like the idea of kebab casing, without the ecosystem around it changing, I have historically just apathetically accepted camelCase and snake_case, and despite being a Python lover at my core, I've gravitated more and more to camelCase as time has gone on because I definitely do find capitalization easier to parse than hyphens or underscores. I like it for the same reason I like significant whitespace. Yes, it's more painful to parse and design a language around, but it's that much closer to pseudocode.

a - b certainly isn't counterintuitive to read, and neither is max-pos - cur-pos.

But is max-pos - cur-pos better to read than maxPos - minPos or max_pos - cur_pos? I would say no to both cases.

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