From: Dave Howell <groups@...>
Date: 2005-10-06T21:01:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Object Orientation


On Oct 5, 2005, at 8:56, Robert Klemme wrote:

> Krekna Mektek wrote:
>> By the way, why are methods not named following the lowercaseUppercase
>> convention, as in Java?
>> This way I can see more directly that something is a method, and not
>> an instance variable.
>>
>> I'd like to do it that way, but am not sure if this is against some
>> Ruby philosophy..
>
> No problem with that.  It's just, um, that you will die a slow and 
> painful
> death if you use CamelCase.  Don't ask me how it works - it's Matz
> Magic(TM) built right into your Ruby runtime.

I've always found underscores hard to type and annoying to read, so 
I've never used them in any of my programming.

All of my code looks like

	def newMartini
		attr_reader :withOlive

		def initialize(dryness)

		end

		def shakenNotStirred
		end
	end

and so on. It's regrettable (and generally a poor design choice) that 
case is significant, so you can't capitalize the initial character of 
methods or variables, but other than that, name them as you like.

++ warning: rant below ++

[Why a poor design choice? Because except for certain specific enclaves 
in computer programming (e.g. Unix, but not Mac, not Windows, not DEC 
VAX, not BASIC, not Pascal, not REXX, and not Modula-2, to draw from 
personal experience), case isn't "significant." Including, oh, the 
entire rest of the world's written literature. Nobody thinks that Dave 
and DAVE and dave are three different people, or that a Ph.D is 
different from a  PH.D. Recipes can have Tbsp or tbsp, and on and on 
and on. You'd have to look long and hard, or find a Unix programmer, in 
order to find somebody who thought WordPerfect was spelled differently 
than Wordperfect, and e. e. cummings gets filed after Carter but before 
Dostoyevsky, not somewhere after the Z's. Capitalization is used for 
readability and convenience, but explicit meaning, especially 
identification, does not allow itself to change through mere 
capitalization; a message in all caps states the same things as one in 
all lower case (notwithstanding the possible *implicit* messages of 
emphasis). An italic R, a lower-case R, a cursive R, a bold R, a 
capital R: they are all the same letter, and functionally 
interchangeable. Except in a tiny minority of cases. Like Unix. And 
Ruby.]