this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Acronyms/intialism use capital letters to encode information about words. Losing that information is a mistake. SᴍᴀʟʟCᴀᴘCᴀsᴇ is now considered a best practice.

…Or consider snake_case or kebab-case 🤷

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Dear god please no. This way madness lies. Your idea of "whatever you think works best" is not going to line up with whatever the next person that comes along thinks, and your codebase is about to get all kinds of fucked up.

Thinking code complete is going to save you is naive. Even in languages like C and Java, where it works best, you still need to be able to read and understand the code in context. There's no hope in a language like Ruby with all it's meta programming stuff

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not suggesting randomness or inconsistency, I'm saying generalizing is overkill. But you're right, "whatever works" might be taken too literal by some

You're absolutely right that depending on your autofill is not a good general approach either. Then again, you shouldn't be guessing at these either

I've worked with changing conventions in different teams. In the end people are not going to come up with some name and whether it's myOldThing or my_old_thing won't matter much. Usually I just follow whatever the team I'm working with prefers

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Yes and no. I agree that camel vs snake or that stupid mNameThing that was popular for a while, doesn't reeeeeaaally matter, although I would argue that convention over the language still has value. As an example, naming a Java variable with a capital letter would be confusing and annoying to any new devs joining the project, even if it's a valid identifier. Also it's handy to be able to look at something in ALL_CAPS and know that it's probably a static final, without having to check it's definition. I guess it's about finding that line between useful conventions and pedantry.