Daniel Fischer <daniel.is.fisc...@web.de> writes: > Am Dienstag 15 Dezember 2009 03:04:43 schrieb Richard O'Keefe: >> On Dec 14, 2009, at 5:11 PM, Daniel Fischer wrote: >> > 1. I wasn't playing in the under_score vs. camelCase game, just >> > proposing a possible >> > reason why the camelCase may have been chosen for Haskell's standard >> > libraries. >> >> But the insanely abbreviated example did not provide such a reason. > > Of course not. But if you expand it - and it's not difficult, > even when insanely abbreviated -, the resulting sentence gives > a possible reason: "Maybe it's because the underscore style is > considered far uglier and less readable by others." If the > early Haskellers felt that way, isn't it perfectly natural > that they chose the camelCase style?
As one of the early Haskellers, I definitely preferred underscores, because my intuition told me that it was closer in appearance to normal English¹ text, and my belief was that even programmers read more English than code. Unfortunately I'm not a very persuasive person, and couldn't argue my case (beyond having underscores /permitted/). The problem is that once people have spent some time using one style or other, their ability to self-analyse their reading of it becomes negligible. "Ugly" and "less readable" become synonymous with "not the style I'm used to", irrespective of actual effects on reading speed. And introspection is a notoriously bad method of anyalysing psychological factors in the first place. This really should have been decided with proper experiments. > Of course, they may have had entirely different reasons, or no > concrete reason at all and it just happened. In the absence of hard data, it only takes a slight bias in exposure among members of the committee to tip a decision the wrong way. [1] and quite a high proportion of other natural languages. -- Jón Fairbairn jon.fairba...@cl.cam.ac.uk _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe