From: Jonas Hartmann <Mail@...>
Date: 2005-12-09T11:26:28+09:00
Subject: Re: They say I write Ruby like Perl

James Edward Gray II wrote:
> On Dec 8, 2005, at 8:27 AM, 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.
> 
> 
> We feel exactly the opposite.  That's your *why*.  ;)
> 
> The human eye picks out words by shape.  We use spaces between words  to 
> separate those shapes into easily digested chunks.  OneLongWord is  not 
> a shape we are use to, so we have to stop and think.   Unfortunately, 
> spaces aren't allowed in programming variables.  The _  character is 
> allowed though and the next best thing, so we go with that.
> 
> This is all my opinion, of course.
I share this, and I think ruby capable editors could be told to gray out underscores within variable and method names. (so that they are visible but can be easily ignored while reading).

just my 0.2 eurocent.