Case insensitivity

[Gregory Bond]

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> writes:

> My own intuition and experience tells me that there seem to be two
> kinds of people: some folks think case-sensitively, others think
> case-insensitively.  Myself, I am a case-sensitive person, but I can
> easily learn to work with case-insensitive systems.  It's possible
> that most programmers have case-sensitive minds, but I think that most
> non-programmers probably have case-insensitive minds.

My gut feeling agrees, but I wonder if this is because most
fair-dinkum programmers these days come from a C/Pascal/Java
background where case is sensitive and that's all we've ever known.
If you speak to people whose main language is CobOL or ForTRan (or
BASIC in its myriad forms) they may be notionally case-insensitive
thinkers.  And these people also seem to be among the "sometimes
Python programmers" target group.

Or to put it another way, the set of "programmers" is much larger and
more diverse than the set of "programmers a bit like me".