Programming

13368 readers

2 users here now

All things programming and coding related. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

Hexorg@beehaw.org

remington@beehaw.org

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

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

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] delial@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this is one of those constant annoyances that you kinda just live with. It doesn't matter that much, because compound words were at some point not one word, and there may be separate words that you use today that will join together during your career. Electronic mail became e-mail became email. As long as the casing doesn't hide the meaning, you're doing it right. Also be consistent. Don't recreate such monstrosities as XMLHttpRequest.