Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)
Fredrik Lundh
effbot at telia.com
Sun May 21 10:40:54 EDT 2000
Marko Samastur <markos at elite.org> wrote:
> > some relevant quotes:
> >
> > "Python is case sensitive. While we, as programmers, were com-
> > fortable with this language feature, our user community suffered
> > much confusion over it. At least 85% of users who were observed
> > using the Alice tutorial made a case error at some point during the
> > experience. While explaining the case rule was simple enough
> > ("upper and lower case mean different things to Alice"), this was
> > not sufficient to instill a "case aware" sense in our users. Of the
> > users who had problems with case, most continued to type case-
> > incorrect tokens in their programs for a short period. Coming to
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Part of every learning is making mistakes. Nobody picked up a bicycle
> and knew how to ride it immediately.
Sure, that's what the boo.com folks used to tell their investors ;-)
The problem with your argument is that the Alice environment is a single
system. In a case-sensitive environment, people will waste time typing
"case-incorrect tokens into their programs for a short period", for every
new Python library.
Maybe non-geek programmers have better things to do with their time?
</F>
"What stupidity. We don't need any more case-sensitive computers."
-- Jakob Nielsen
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