Against Camel Case | Hacker News Reader

Against Camel Case

nytimes.com

63 pointsblasdel65 comments

Despite what you might expect, there is actually a fascinating article behind this poorly-titled link; it starts at the fifth paragraph.

It might be folly to try to argue with language anti-evolutionists, but when spacing was added to scripts (according to the author, most recently during the middle ages), minuscule and majuscule were not consistently used at the beginning of sentences. One could make the point that we only really need spacing OR case differences, and don't need both.

Indeed, Paul Saenger, the scholar I quote in the article, writes that during the transitional period, capitals were sometimes used to mark word boundaries in run-together text. Unexpectedly, though, the last letter of a word was more often capitalized than the first.

This reminded me that Commodore BASIC (among others, as this is in no way restricted to that platform, and is a common technique), had bit 5 set in the last byte of each word in its keyword list to signal the end of the word. This had the effect of capitalizing the last letter, and avoided the need for a delimiter character on that memory strapped platform.

hmmm, perhaps conserving paper was also a reason for running words together, and cheaper paper (e.g. from improved trade routes/technology) enabled the reintroduction of spaces.

I'm not sure whether you're aware of this, but many older scripts, including all of the Semitic scripts, actually write letters entirely differently when they appear at the end of a word. Given that the monks who began employing majuscule and minuscule would surely have been familiar with Hebrew script, I'm hardly surprised they initially went to making the last letter significant instead of the first.

That also true for the long s (ſ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s -- it's only used at the start or in the middle of words. The same is true for sigma, σ is used in the start and middle of words, while ς is used in the end of words.

Not all Hebrew letters are different when they appear at the end of a word, just 4 out of 22 letters (if I remember correctly) do.

It's true of Arabic, though; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet#Primary_letters.

[In the New York Times] Thereafter every brand name was permitted up to three idiosyncratic majuscules.

Um, what? It's a brand name. Either you render it correctly, or you don't; there are no typographic decisions to be made unless you're committed to mangling it in the first place, right?

I more or less follow this rule. I'll mention iPhone or TextMate without pause, but SpongeBob SquarePants is asking a bit much and (PRODUCT)RED, which is audacious enough to require a superscript, is just plain silly.

people always butcher the camelCasing on our company name. It's supposed to be Setfive but people will often write SetFive or Set Five. good thing the bank really doesn't care.

A decade ago, many journalistic outlets didn't humor brand-motivated capitalizations. They didn't accept the company's own marketing staff as authoritative about what was "correct" and what was "mangling". It was Ebay, not eBay; Next, not NeXT; Nationsbank not NationsBank; etc.

This article is a lamentation that the journalistic style guardians didn't hold the line.

Here's William Safire's 1997 take on the issue, alluded to by Crain but not linked:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-na...

I'm for camel case as a necessary evolution: there are so many similar names, and name collisions, that anything that lets someone try to be distinguishable, and anything that might make two words fit together more distinctively than if paired any otherway, deserves a chance.

A press release from a typical company will throw as much glitter on their own brand name as possible, and usually butcher the surrounding language a bit too:

"the new FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk..."

If a writer takes this literally, a copy editor has to tone it down or else the brand name will dominate the article text and make it look like an ad, too: "It's a Frisbee." Fun variants include meaningless alternating caps, or a single lowercase 'i' inside an otherwise all-caps word.

Newspapers want to use the brand name, not the logo or an ASCII attempt at one; and in decades past, fixing the caps helped comprehension rather than hurting it. They considered capitalization part of presentation, not content. (Shouldn't a brand name survive an all-caps typeface?)

In the USA you can't use the brand name as a noun, or the owner risks losing legal control over the mark. Hence "FRISBEE [TM] brand Flying Disk."

Only if it's used casually as a generic term. Keeping it uppercased proper noun (Frisbee) respects the trademark as far as the law is concerned, so that was the Associated Press guideline. Adding [TM] lets the owner emphasize that the trademark was applied for, (R) means it's fully registered, but neither symbol is required for mentioning the brand in print -- just simple capitalization is enough to respect the trademark.

I won't go as far as the author but I think camel cased names are going to look pretty dated in the future.

As Ken MacLeod put it in "The Star Fraction", written in 1995 and set in the mid-twenty first century:

"The name [FreeSpace] had once seemed trendy, but now dated us painfully - 'very TwenCen', as I'd overheard someone say..."

> As Ken MacLeod put it [...]

Ironic name, don't you think?

This is infuriating coming from the Times. Are they similarly disgruntled with FedEx? AmEx? Camel-case capitalization is used to create enforceable trademarks. It is the unfortunate truth that legally enforceable trademarks have to be substantially not generic, and this leads itself to quirky names like Kleenex and ex-lax.

This is particularly bothersome: "I could print it here to show you, but I refuse to allow my prose to be so disfigured." Camel-case names are not Voldemort; you should not talk about not talking about them. If Cain is so concerned, he should do the simple thing and call it a mobile phone, or a music player.

This is journalistic drivel, and tarnishes my opinion of the Times.

Columns are the words of their author, not the newspaper. They don't necessarily agree with the opinions of the paper.

On the same note, columns aren't news items or reports. They are opinion pieces. To call it "journalistic drivel"—or "journalistic" at all—is unjustified.

Columns are meant to give opinions. It's not unusual to see columns written with the intent of giving an opinion that's opposite to the one held by average readers. The opinion of the newspaper's editors is usually given in the editorial.

But one could wish that they were more often RATIONAL opinions. Everyone has opinions, I just wish more thought went into those that make it into print.

> To call it "journalistic drivel"—or "journalistic" at all—is unjustified.

You're right, and in retrospect I'm surprised that I used that word. These days I expect this sort of inane rant from someone's blog that I will ignore in the future, not "nytimes.com". Maybe blogs have made opinion columns irrelevant? I can see how papers might have been boring in the past, but today we have an infinite tap of ranting idiots... maybe the papers should stick to journalism?

The On Language column in the Times was written for about thirty years by a guy named William Safire. The column usually criticized some recent instance of language usage in popular culture. He was frequently peevish but managed to avoid coming across as acerbic. Safire died recently, and since then his column has been written by a series of guest authors. In this instance, the author is trying to recreate Safire's style and unfortunately fails miserably.

You see the same thing in the British automotive press. Everyone wants to write like Jeremy Clarkson, but nobody else can pull off his style without coming across as a total asshole.

Neither can Clarkson, based on my brief exposure.

I always thought it was camelCase and PascalCase. Googling gives me a handful of articles that support that distinction, but wikipedia doesn't make the separation.

Is the term PascalCase widespread, or does everyone just call it CamelCase?

I'd once heard the difference described as BactrianCase and dromedaryCase :)

I've known it as lowerCamel and UpperCamel

An online bibliographical supplement: http://www.steamthing.com/2009/11/the-kneecapping-of-interca...

I much prefer William Safire's treatment linked from that bibliography: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/magazine/jammedtogether-na...

Safire seems to treat the whole thing with a sense of playfulness and levity, as if he realizes that the very purpose of a language is to evolve. Crain's article is preachy and disdainful- he might as well shoo us with a broom and tell us to get off his lawn.

Safire's piece is an order-of-magnitude better than this one.

He is missed.

I like the other one better.

The tone you call 'preachy and disdainful' I find humorous and self-aware. Likewise the conceit of refusing to print any camel-case terms. "I could print it here to show you, but I refuse to allow my prose to be so disfigured": it's a parody of a grumpy-old-man routine. I assume he's sincere in his distaste for inner caps, but he plainly recognizes that it makes him sound like an old codger, and he's playing that up for comic effect.

That could be, and I certainly did a double-take when I saw this his blog is called "Steamboats are ruining everything." Still, at first blush, any winking and/or nodding was lost on me, and I usually pick up on that kind of stuff.

I thought it was pretty clear when he added the part about letting the dog sleep on the sofa.

"Preachy and disdainful" -- I did not find it so. In fact, close to tongue-in-cheek, more of a "ha ha, just serious".

... "Three! And why not let the dog sleep on the sofa?"

I guess he's grateful he's not German

Huh? Where are camel cases used in German?

They're not, but many german words run together. See http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html for humourous examples.

Camel casing in brands can be confusing when writing.

Is it Paypal or PayPal? Microsoft or MicroSoft? Moneybookers or MoneyBookers? Macintosh or MacIntosh? Altavista or AltaVista? Wikipedia or WikiPedia? And so on, and so forth.

Some you can remember. Others may require you to look them up every time.

But well—we already have to worry about spaces and dashes, so I suppose worrying about one more thing isn't so bothersome.

"But well—we already have to worry about spaces and dashes, so I suppose worrying about one more thing isn't so bothersome."

There's plenty more than that to worry about.

The worst is the Walmart brand, which is controlled by Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. They use both forms in their communications depending on which is being referred to.

"Heresy became easier to communicate, and Saenger postulates that word spacing eventually made possible phenomena like irony, pornography and freedom of conscience."

I've always associated Camel Case with Perl. So much so that I assumed the name derived from the Camel Book. But I suppose it's just were I first saw it used extensively.

Anyway this quote from the article sums up my feelings on both Camel Case and Perl.

"is regressive — in fact, medieval"

Actually perlstyle suggests avoiding Camel Case:

  While short identifiers like $gotit are probably ok, use
  underscores to separate words in longer identifiers.  It is
  generally easier to read $var_names_like_this than
  $VarNamesLikeThis, especially for non-native speakers of English.

It must be a really slow day on Hacker News - how has this got four upvotes?

Really, seriously, can someone tell me why this is even the vaguest bit interesting or intellectually stimulating to them? I would honestly be interested in hearing an opinion other than mine.

Because we use camel case in programming, and we are curious what non programmers think of it.

Really? Do you really care what non-programmers think of CamelCase? Why not ask them what they think of using braces, or indentation?

Clearly people think my question detracts from the value of HN because they're downvoting it, but to me it's worth it to investigate a place where the opinion of the "community" differs so radically from mine.

I have zero interest in finding out what people think of summation notation, or bra and ket notation, and, quite frankly, I find it inconceivable (and I do mean that, unlike Vizzini) that programmers would care what non-programmers think about CamelCase.

Still, you're being up-voted, I'm being down-voted, so obviously people really are interested in that. I'm mystified, but I'll accept it as a data point.

ADDED IN EDIT after reading the comment by benatkin to the above:

I am genuinely surprised, confused and puzzled. I'll have to re-think my model of what the HN readers think satisfies PG's outline of "On-Topic":

    Anything that good hackers would find interesting ...
    gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I'm going away to ponder the response, feeling somewhat bruised and punished by the "community" I thought I understood and felt at home in.

I'm interested because I want more than half of the people who are currently in high school to know a little bit about programming in ten years, and I wonder what might trip up some of them in an introductory programming course.

I imagine, "What's all this? Why not just write (dwim)?"

I don't find camel case interesting in itself, but the evolution and adoption of the technology of written language is intellectually stimulating to me.

The article suggests that written language used to be read aloud - it was a recording of spoken language rather than directly interpretable in itself: monks had to read it aloud to understand it. A bit like an LP (remember Hofstadter's tortoise character who enjoyed LPs by looking at the groove patterns?) And then, it was found that the eye could recognise words directly, without needing to read aloud (or subvocalize), and that this technology became widely adopted over centuries.

The article discusses europe - I wonder if it was a localized cultural change; whether the greeks and romans already had this technology or if they needed to "read aloud" (I believe they favoured memorizing epic poetry); and of course whether other areas (especially china) had a similar change at a similar time.

There's a tantalizing possibility that it may have been accompanied by biological change, perhaps similar to the bizarre and fascinating concept of "The Bicameral Mind".

Or perhaps my intellectually curiosity is reading too much into the article? If so, the article stimulated it.

EDIT I was sure the guidelines used to say "intellectually stimulating", but you're right, it's "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I found the article more intellectually provocative than gratifying, so maybe you're right.

BTW: I've found my upvotes/downvotes on comments aren't working anymore (I need to refresh to see it). Is HN secretly experimenting with vote privileges (karma threshold over 2183? average over 2.68? membership over 304 days?). Is it a bug? Or have I somehow irritated someone powerful?

feeling somewhat bruised and punished

Let go of that like you drop a filthy sock! Think of it this way: If you never disagree with what others put on the front page, how often are you going to be truly surprised? How often are you going to read something that you didn't know you liked until you clicked on it?

I like to think that a certain number of articles I detest is a necessary complement to enjoying a certain number of "Wow, I'd never thought of that" moments on HN.

I hope that perspective helps you shrug off the odd time you get downmobbed for calling out an article that doesn't "gratify your intellectual curiosity."

Thank you for taking the time to reply, and I agree with the points you make. I do expect to be surprised occasionally by the articles that make the front page. I do expect there to be articles I hate, and continue to hate after reading them, and I do expect that there are articles for which I change my mind and learn something.

What I didn't expect was for people to down-mod me heavily simply for expressing an opinion that was different to theirs. I thought people would ignore or reply. I have always regarded down-modding as reserved for things that don't belong here, and I thought legitimate questioning does belong here.

Clearly I was wrong. The conclusion is that people down-mud me purely because they disagreed, and couldn't be bothered to articulate their reasons. That's why I'm disappointed, and feeling set upon.

I had hoped and expected that people would value contributions, even if the opinions expressed differed from their own. I thought the article was a complete waste of time, said so, and honestly asked why people thought otherwise. For that I got hammered.

I'm disappointed.

It won't stop me from reading and contributing, but it has made me stop and reconsider some things. I'll certainly be less open and more wary.

I voted your post down because you were rude and condescending. Here's an another (more respectful) way in which you could have written your post:

"I see that this story has a lot of upvotes, but it's not a story that I found particularly interesting. Could someone give me their perspective on why they liked this article?"

You also did what is often done to a large number of articles posted to HN: You asked a variant of "why is this hacker news?!," the answer to which is always the same: "because X number of people found that it gratified their intellectual curiosity and voted it up." It gets old after a while, but I personally wouldn't object to someone repeatedly asking the question as long as they were respectful and truly interested in the response rather than asking it as a way to complain.

Hmm. If you found that rude and condescending - and I don't doubt your word - then I'm rather pleased I didn't write what I first thought, and instead toned it down to what I thought was comparatively constructive. Obviously not by enough.

I'll take your comments on board - thank you for taking the time to explain.

I agree with sounddust (I can't just upvote, because my upvotes aren't registering). Although I personally wasn't offended by your attitude (I've gotten used to people having that attitude on HN), your comment was objectively prejudicial: "even the vaguest bit interesting". Not neutral or impartial, which are ideals of the intellectual gratification you seek here...

My personal response is to reply factually, simply ignoring the tone in a comment, as the guidelines imply (with the "2+2=4" example) - and not to downvote unless it's egregious.

But maybe it's fortunate in the bigger scheme of things that you were downvoted - because of this feedback you got. Each little change improves the site as a whole.

BTW: I was thinking that net 2 downvotes, from 1 to -1 (and now 3 downvotes, to -2) is not indicative of the opinion of the community as a whole ... but given that many people vote to adjust a comment score to where they think it should be, maybe it is representative.

I've up-voted sounddust for you.

I come from a background where the ideas of neutral and impartial are independent of those of intellectual gratification. In mathematics one has strong opinions and can state them clearly, and in reply, people can tell you you're wrong without it being mistaken for a personal attack. I guess I just let that leak over into here - now being in business I usually keep it under wraps.

That's what I meant elsewhere when I said I would be less open. In future I won't be so blunt in my opinions, as am in math, and wrap them more, as I do in business.

We've done this to death I think - I really appreciate the feedback. Thanks.

Thanks! I don't want to prolong the agony - but I'm curious about about "neutral and impartial" vs. "intellectual gratification."

If one's opinions and emotions distort the facts, it is difficult to have intellectual gratification, because one cannot see clearly. To me, intellectual gratification requires absolute honesty, as in science (as Feynman says). In other words, the problem isn't that someone is offended, but that one's own vision is distorted.

Perhaps in mathematics this isn't so important because the mathematics itself is already impartial. :-)

> What I didn't expect was for people to down-mod me heavily simply for expressing an opinion that was different to theirs.

You either need more experience with people or to pay more attention to your experience. And no, hackers aren't different.

> I'll certainly be less open and more wary.

How does that follow?

If you're doing things for praise from other people ....

  >> What I didn't expect was for people to down-mod me
  >> heavily simply for expressing an opinion that was
  >> different to theirs.

  > You either need more experience with people or
  > to pay more attention to your experience.  And
  > no, hackers aren't different.

I've only been here just over a year, and one of the things that really attracted me into staying was the way people tolerated opinions that were different, and discussed them intelligently. It seemed (I could've been wrong, of course) that down-modding was reserved for things that were out of place, rather than diagreed with.

Maybe I was wrong, maybe things have changed. Either way, I've learned something. HN isn't as different as I'd thought or hoped.

  >> I'll certainly be less open and more wary.

  > How does that follow?  If you're doing things
  > for praise from other people ....

I'm not doing things for praise, I'm doing things in the hope that others will find them interesting, and if they disagree, to use them as an opportunity for at least one of us to learn. Clearly that's not the case as much as I remember it being. The community (in as much as there is one) has spoken, and I will be less free with opinions that might be unpopular. If all that happens is that it gets down-mud, no one learns anything.

> I'm not doing things for praise, I'm doing things in the hope that others will find them interesting

Okay

> The community (in as much as there is one) has spoken, and I will be less free with opinions that might be unpopular.

A couple of people is "the community"?

From what I've read, many people vote if they think the current score needs adjusting, and don't otherwise. If that's widespread, then most of those who have read the comment and seen it at -2 feel that it's right.

These things are always statistical, have large margins of error, and cannot be taken as certain, but they are indications.

Anyway, this has been done to death, so I shall leave it alone now. Thanks for your feedback.

It is a light hearted article with a laugh of two, and I learnt that something I take for granted (spaces between words) was only just established by the 13th century. No wonder so many people were illiterate, their texts were illegible. (Ignoring the fact that those texts were probably quite hard to get a hold of in the first place...)

It isn't canonical Hacker News, however. Everyone expects HN to trend towards Reddit, though, don't they?

> It is a light hearted article with a laugh of two

I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw it that way. Is it just me, or does Hacker News take things too literally sometimes?

There was some interesting stuff about why language used to not have spacing in it. The first few paragraphs were not really worth reading.

Edit: Removed "in my opinion" because that's obvious :-P

Agreed, I started skipping paragraphs - just skimming the topic sentences - and then started reading it closely when it began interesting again.

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