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Comment by threethirtytwo | Hacker News Reader

I highly disagree. You are judging a book by it's cover. Capitalization is no different from handwriting. Substance matters, capitalization and grammar are superficial. If meaning is captured then capitalization does not intrinsically matter.

You are correct that people judge documentation off of grammar and punctuation. But this is not a rational or logical thing people do. But I can't blame you or others, I mean after all the world believes in religion, myths and other fantasmic spiritual things with no solid evidence as backing. It's normal. I just felt HN was above that. Guess I'm wrong.

>...seems shallow / callous.

Seems that way only because you're not thinking deep enough. Think carefully whether it is rational or logical to judge the works of say Einstein because he had a grammar error or bad handwriting. The two are completely orthogonal and that is the rational perspective.

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Not to make a point of it either way, but judging a book by its cover can be useful if the credibility of the book's content alone is difficult to evaluate. That's why people care about degrees and other qualifications.

There are plenty of other ways. Book reviews for example. If the cover is the only way than so be it, but this is rarely case. Additionally the cover of a book, like capitalization is one of the most inaccurate metrics to judge a book by.

My point is that a questionable cover can indicate problems. I agree that one should be as holistic as possible.

In programming, capitalization does matter. Sorry.

It doesn’t. I don’t know how something so simple can’t be understood. Does capitalization matter in math or algebra or logic? No. It doesn’t. Why? Because capitalization is a concept exclusive to language, and not just any language, but an arbitrary family of languages similar to English. The concept for example does not exist in Chinese.

But you know this. Are you trolling?

Sure, but we program using programming languages, mostly using the Latin alphabet you are referring to. And yes the syntax for many of those programming languages is in fact case sensitive.

Obviously. The topic is about whether case sensitivity + capitalization matters not whether it exists. My claim is it doesn’t matter much. Whether you use I or i in your for loop as an index doesn’t matter.

And it’s completely irrelevant to logic or math. So whether or not you choose to make capitalization matter in your program is a completely arbitrary choice. It’s like snake case and cane case. You choose one style for consistency but in the end even if you use both styles in your program there is zero practical downside. The only downside is people with ocd get all worked up and don’t have the capacity to understand that it doesn’t matter.

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