From: Tim Hammerquist <penryu@...>
Date: 2005-12-09T06:42:36+09:00
Subject: Re: They say I write Ruby like Perl

Rich <rjseagraves@gmail.com> 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.

As Ezra stated elsewhere (and as frequently stated in the Perl
community), it's much more difficult for non-native English
speakers to read squishedCaps, and for that matter, it's not
always terribly simple for native English speakers to do so.

I can personally attest to this phenomenon, especially from
reading Japanese.  After a semester of the language, and some
additional self-study, I can now (usually) tell the difference
between katakana, hiragana, and kanji in a sentence.  And since
a common Japanese sentence won't contain any spaces at all, and
the fact that many Japanese words contain both kanji and
hiragana together, I gain more and more respect for any
non-English speakers reading my code.

Which is more pleasing is apparently a matter of personal
preference.  Which we should *use* isn't necessarily such
a selfish decision.

Cheers,
Tim Hammerquist