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Does anyone else struggle with compound words? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by EdriMareyemi@beehaw.org to c/programming@beehaw.org

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Was looking through some code today, and found something that highlights my biggest struggles in programming, it's compound words and casing. Had identifiers such as...

strikeThroughOffset
whitespaceWidth
lineSpacing
underlineOffset
outlineThickness

I can keep in mind "strike through off set", but then I struggle to remember, is it strikethrough or strikeThrough? What about Offset or OffSet? Why are offset, underline, and outline, all one word, but strikeThrough isn't? I think of it as one compound word, many people apparently do, but I guess someone who wrote this code doesn't.

Or... is this just a me problem? Does anyone else struggle with this sort of thing? Am I missing something or should I "just get good"? My best solution so far is just keep everything always lowercase, personally I find that more readable and memorable, but that's a lot to ask of literally every other programmer in the world...

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[–] upstream@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I see this a lot with a significant portion of my colleagues, maybe around 30%.

Personally I don’t feel like it’s a big issue for me, but on the other hand I’ve been working mostly in Python (snake_casing) for the last six years.

That said I do see people having issues with it even in Python, so it’s not like snake casing cures the issue.

Always lowercase gets a downvote from me though.