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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'd take the approach of "flattening" compound words and joining them with the preferred style for the given language. Take your first one, for example:

strike-through off-set -> strikethrough offset

Python (snake_case): strikethrough_offset

Go (camelCase): strikethroughOffset

Rust type (UpperCamelCase): StrikethroughOffset ... etc

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I totally agree with what you're saying. Also, I think UpperCamelCase is called Pascal case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It is, the one that starts with lower case is called camel case. As in camelCase has a "hump"