Very good points. A codebase that gets this VERY wrong is Gitlab. I think it might be a dumb characteristic of Ruby programs, but they generate identifiers all over the place. I once had to literally give up following some code because I could not find what it was calling anywhere. Insanity.
Another point: don’t use - in names. Eventually you’ll have to write them down in a programming language, at which point you have to change the name. CSS made this mistake. foo-bar in CSS maps to fooBar in Javascript. Rust also made this mistake with crate names. A crate called foo-bar magically becomes foo_bar in Rust code.
Yeah, translating between cases isn’t exactly a problem IME. Might be neat to have a case-aware grep though, so you can get kebab-case, snake_case, camelCase and PascalCase all done in one go.
Very good points. A codebase that gets this VERY wrong is Gitlab. I think it might be a dumb characteristic of Ruby programs, but they generate identifiers all over the place. I once had to literally give up following some code because I could not find what it was calling anywhere. Insanity.
Another point: don’t use
-in names. Eventually you’ll have to write them down in a programming language, at which point you have to change the name. CSS made this mistake.foo-barin CSS maps tofooBarin Javascript. Rust also made this mistake with crate names. A crate calledfoo-barmagically becomesfoo_barin Rust code.The dash
-vs underscore_is also a common “problem” with CLI arguments--file-name, that are mapped to variable namesfile_name.Yeah, translating between cases isn’t exactly a problem IME. Might be neat to have a case-aware grep though, so you can get kebab-case, snake_case, camelCase and PascalCase all done in one go.
I’ve been working in Ruby on Rails lately (unfortunately) and yeah it’s extremely bad at this. There’s so much hidden implicit behavior everywhere.