Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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Why not both and neither? IMHO this is one of those things where people seem to congregate and advocate for one side religiously, but I don't see much value in that. Why can't the style simply imply how much scope and importance an identifier has? I've never liked naming dogma, but this is what I find to be natural:

    trivialidentifier - local variables inside a function, usually < 3 words/abbrs
    slightly_important_identifier - function names with limited scope
    ImportantIdentifier - widely-used functions, class/struct names
    More_Important_Identifier - classes/structs that are quite important
    VERY_IMPORTANT_IDENTIFIER - global constants and (rarely) classes/structs

That seems less understandable to me. I think it's easier to grok if certain classes of things always use the same casing. So all functions would use snake_case, type names would use PascalCase, global constants use UPPER_CAMEL_CASE, etc.

"Importance" is subjective, and regardless, IMO not really an important measure of anything.

That's sort of what Python's PEP8 recommends. CamelCase for class names, snake_case for the rest, and SNAKE_CASE for constants.

And Ruby and Rust.

Interestingly, PHP's PSR family specifically does _not_ take a stance on naming conventions for locally-scoped variables.

Shame that the standard library doesn't follow those recommendations (hello unittest).

also startswith(), endswith()

Because everyone will have a different opinion about the importance of any given name.

Hell I'll have differing opinions about the importance of the same name at different times of day.

  Why can't the style simply imply how much scope and importance an identifier has?

Because lack of underscores doesn’t unanimously imply lack of importance or scope.

I call it CONSTANT_CASE and use it for constants.

It’s commonly called ALL_CAPS (e.g. https://gcc.gnu.org/codingconventions.html#C_Names).

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