Comment by manjalyc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manjalyc | Hacker News Reader

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Only the first letter being case-sensitive is a major strike against readability, one of four major pillars. While I’m sure the Nim developers are probably used to it by now, it just seems like a bad design decision Nim is probably burdened with as the result of legacy/interoperabilty.

Even just reading your foobar example at a glance took a moment for me.

And case insensitivity is also generally frowned upon. To have a language with both sensitivity and insensitivity is the worst of all worlds with none of the benefits.

If you want to understand why at a deeper level I would recommend reading readability or the case insensitivity sections in any programming languages book. Personally, I enjoy Programming Languages, Principles and Practice (Louden & Lambert)

EDIT: Yes, I get it, it doesn't affect YOU. But it doesn't mean it doesn't affect other people. Non-english languages and/or speakers are an easy example. It also eliminates a whole class of human error, and maybe that only affects non-experienced juniors, but they exist too. There are other issues with symbols being case insensitive and string values being case sensitive. If you want a practical example a classic one is HttpsFtpConn vs. HttpSftpConn

As a powershell user I have never had an issue with case sensitivity at the language level as Sigils provide separation of concerns between language constructs (keywords/variables/types). You’re using an IDE with autocomplete most of the time and many other languages have linters/formatters.

All I have personally experienced of case sensitivity is an added layer of friction any time I go to use a REPL for Bash/Python/Javascript/etc or some awful ‘allowercasewords’ gets cemented in place barring a total refactor since you can’t correct files piecemeal.

And case sensitivity in the language doesn’t even help with case sensitivity at the OS level when you’re writing cross platform code =/

The theory says that it hinders readability but in practice it doesn't. Nim has a prescribed style and if you use the linter when compiling your code has a consistent style.

Like cardanome said, in practice it's awesome for FFI.

Very good example. I didn't even know about first letter sensitivity and the rest insensitivities. That's real big problem.

Also since nim is very ninche and used by very little perscentage of the world they haven't encounter much of production scale coding. Well that may be reason nim never get pass weekend hobby projects..

> Only the first letter being case-sensitive is a major strike against readability

…How? Do you find code more readable when there are two different names that differ only in the capitalization of a non-first letter?

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