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

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

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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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[–] EdriMareyemi@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hmm per-syllable camel case, is that a thing? Sounds interesting! I might like that one lol

But yeah, am I able to use another casing style... the thing is, kinda yes? But kinda no. I think I basically can manage any style (Though not a fan of the underscore_style but hey, can do), it's really just compound words that trip me up. Like, consider white space width and strike through off set. I can keep every word in mind, but apparently whitespace is one word, and strike through might be two words, depending on who you ask. So to me, I think this is correct: whitespace_width, strikethrough_offset

But someone else might think it should be: white_space_width, strike_through_off_set

And yet a third person might do: whitespace_width, strike_through_offset

I just can't memorize which words are compound words, and which ones aren't, and I don't know how to tell without just knowing. I know what words go into identifier names, but when some of those words might be compound words, I get all messed up, which is a bit of an issue when working with other people's code.

Maybe in a way, my problem is that I memorize the names of things in a sort of "spoken" state; I "say" strike through off set in my mind, but capitalization doesn't affect speech, so if its 'strikethroughoffset' or 'StrikeThroughOffSet", my brain is gonna memorize it as just the 4 words, "strike through off set".

So in the end, the easiest thing I've found when working on my own projects is just keep everything lowercase, no underscores. The tiniest exception I might make is a singleton, but generally I think "If I have a collection of data and functions, and there will only be 1 instance of it, there's a name for that: A namespace" so I don't often employ those. (Maybe you can tell I have C/C++ in mind especially lol)