On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Damian Conway <dam...@conway.org> wrote:
> And is it really so hard to teach: "use underscore by default and reserve > hyphens for between a noun and its adjective"? Perhaps it *is*, but > then that's a very sad reflection on our profession. > If anything, it's a sad reflection on humanity. I don't see any special reason that our profession should be an exception to Sturgeon's law. And, IMHO, conventions should be such that every Joe-Coder should to be able to understand and use them, which means they should be as simple as possible. This thread itself proves that the choice of places where hyphen and underscore should be used under this scheme *feels* ambiguous, even if it strictly isn't so. I believe it would be best to have a rule for hyphen-or-underscore that can be mechanically applied. This would enable a perl6critic tool to check its proper usage, and more importantly, make the choice easy for Joe-Coder since he does not like to think much about function names. With such conventions, it is important to cater to mere mortals, since their code would form the bulk, which means a misunderstanding on their part would make their 'convention' the popular one, which is probably not a good thing. We might end up with PHP-ish nightmare of mixed conventions in function naming. I might go so far as to say that we could drop underscores altogether, and embrace the Lispy way of using hyphens everywhere. Easier to type, looks good, and simple to apply. My 2c, Sundar -- ! Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. ! If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich.
