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Does anyone else struggle with compound words? (beehaw.org)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Was looking through some code today, and found something that highlights my biggest struggles in programming, it's compound words and casing. Had identifiers such as...

strikeThroughOffset
whitespaceWidth
lineSpacing
underlineOffset
outlineThickness

I can keep in mind "strike through off set", but then I struggle to remember, is it strikethrough or strikeThrough? What about Offset or OffSet? Why are offset, underline, and outline, all one word, but strikeThrough isn't? I think of it as one compound word, many people apparently do, but I guess someone who wrote this code doesn't.

Or... is this just a me problem? Does anyone else struggle with this sort of thing? Am I missing something or should I "just get good"? My best solution so far is just keep everything always lowercase, personally I find that more readable and memorable, but that's a lot to ask of literally every other programmer in the world...

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have issues with acronyms. For example, SMS: Is it activateSms or activateSMS? What about smsPermission vs sMSPermission?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

My rule of thumbs is if its more than three characters capitalize only the first letter. So, given your example I would write activateSms and smsPermission.

The key is consistency.