CamelCase versus wide_names (Prothon)

[Carl Banks]

Roy Smith wrote:
> By contrast, the languages of math (maths to you silly Europeans), 
> science, and engineering are full of wonderful typography.  Different 
> fonts, character sets, diacritical marks, character placement, and 
> special symbols are all meaningful.  For the most part, we struggle 
> along with things like
> 
> $ sum from x = 0 to inf [ pi sup x * j hat * omega dot ] $
> 
> when what we'd write with pen and paper looks nothing like that.  
> Someday, when we finally break out of the 80-column, fixed width, 
> monochrome, monofont, monosize, 7-bit world, our arguments about 
> wide_name vs. bumpyCase will seem just as pre-historic as the $$ 
> gibberish above.

I'm not so sure.  All this markup has got to take a lot longer to type
than plain text to input.  It would take a pretty slick interface just
to match the ease of typing plain text, and then the programmer would
have to spend a lot of time learning the slick interface.

Of course, I can easily imagine a bunch of Visual Basic programmers
seeing this and saying, "Wow this is the coolest invention since the
microwave," not really noticing that their productivity had gone down
(just as they didn't notice the microwave really sucks at cooking), so
maybe it has a chance.

BTW, there are some environments that let you do this now; Mathematica
is a good example.  Because it takes so much longer, I never use the
marked up input.


-- 
CARL BANKS                      http://www.aerojockey.com/software
"If you believe in yourself, drink your school, stay on drugs, and
don't do milk, you can get work." 
          -- Parody of Mr. T from a Robert Smigel Cartoon