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Comment by montebicyclelo | Hacker News Reader

IAgreeThatSnakeCaseIsEasierToRead,ThoughIfWeWereToUseCamelCaseMoreWeWouldBeSavingAGoodAmountOfSpace,WhichMightBeUsefulForNarrowBlocksOfText.I'mSuprisedItHasn'tCaughtOnInProse.Actually,LookingAtThis,MaybeIt'sAGoodThingItHasn'tCaughtOnForProse.

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Classical Latin used all caps no spaces, so rather than caught on we moved away from it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

From the article: "paleographers today identify the extinction of scriptio continua as a critical factor in augmenting the widespread absorption of knowledge in the pre-Modern Era. By saving the reader the taxing process of interpreting pauses and breaks, the inclusion of spaces enables the brain to comprehend written text more rapidly."

I_suppose_causality_would_be_difficult_to_establish_here_but_it_is_intriguing_nonetheless._A_little_space_between_words_helps_the_eye_quickly_see_word_boundaries_which_is_helpful_because_in_the_English_language_words_roughly_correspond_to_units_of_meaning.

In most languages, I'd think, not just English.

My favorite deprecated writing convention is boustrophedon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

I kind of love this! I feel like if I got used to reading letters backwards, this would actually be easier to parse, because I don't have to move my eyes back to the start of the next line.

That should totally become the norm. It looks so efficient. Way better than vertical writing systems, etc.

Japanese also doesn't have casing or spaces, which can make text written solely in hiragana (like some Famicom games) hard to read. I don't know enough about Chinese and Korean to opine on how difficult they are to read and comprehend, but by using the four writing systems (hiragana, katakana, kanji, and western script), Japanese is easy enough to read.

I've seen a few Famicom games do the clause spacing though, so it's easier to read. You can almost hear the emphasis tone on all the particles haha.

And yeah in Japanese it's fine, there's a clear visual situation between the Kanji and Kana.

I've read that it such text usually was read out loud. Not sure if doing so actually make it easier to parse, but maybe latin was more phonetically regular than english?

whenwordseparationbecamethestandardsystemitwasseenasasimplificationofromanculturebecauseitunderminedthemetricandrhythmicfluencygeneratedthroughscriptiocontinua

On_the_other_hand,_is_snake_case_really_that_much_better_for_reading_prose?_I_find_this_difficult_to_read_as_well._Also,_at_least_part_of_the_reason_camel_case_prose_is_more_difficult_to_read_is_because_the_beginnings_of_sentences_are_no_longer_uniquely_capitalized,_which_isn't_an_issue_in_code.

Yes, quite a lot better IMO.

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