From: dblack@...
Date: 2005-12-09T01:00:54+09:00
Subject: Re: They say I write Ruby like Perl

Hi --

On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, Rich wrote:

> I'd be interested to know *why* it is a language convention, and more
> important why it is a lanaguage convention that from this thread it
> seems rubyists vigorously insist upon?  For those of us who were
> "raised" with a language like Java (or as some on this list may say,
> brain damaged ;-), lowerCamelCase seems more pleasing to the eye than
> identifiers_with_underscores.

When using Ruby, it's best to think of yourself as "raised with Ruby".
It saves all kinds of trouble :-)

Anyway, underscore names are a convention in Ruby partly because Matz
dislikes cAmElCaSe :-) But that's just the origin (or perhaps a
"creation myth").  There are now many years, and millions of lines of
code, written in the traditional style or something close to it.

At to what a given person does: I guess it's a matter of whether you
feel that these things are absolute or relative.  Or, perhaps, whether
you can put aside the absolute interpretation for the sake of
consistency with the traditions.  I tend to try to use the conventions
of whatever language I'm using.  Even though I hate the look of
camelCase variable names, I've used them in languages where it would
have seemed doctrinaire or "culturally" weird not to.

Part of it, I think, is coming to believe that Ruby is not a sort of
clearing-house for conventions and practices from other languages, but
is itself a language, with people "raised" in it, people who "come
from" it, and so forth.  Still -- the parser will allow camelCase, all
the extra semi-colons you want, printf("%s\n",str); and all the rest
of it.  In that sense it's an inclusive language -- but it's not a
fledgling project, and a set of conventions does exist.


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net

"Ruby for Rails", forthcoming from Manning Publications, April 2006!