Underscores are stupid • Hacker News Board

Re: Underscores are stupid

#51

Post by simias » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:11 PM UTC

What colour do you want your bikeshed painted today?

I for one, don't like the "->" operator in C. It requires two characters and the use of the shift key. I would like that the next standard just used "." for all member access and let the compiler work its magic and guess what needs to be done.

Of course that would break a sizeable amount of legacy code, but who cares about that anyway. The important is that the code looks good, especially if I enable drop shadows and anisotropic filtering in my editor.

Re: Underscores are stupid

#52

Post by agscala » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:15 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #51

What colour do you want your bikeshed painted today? I for one, don't like the "->" operator in C. It requires two characters and the use of the shift key. I would like that the next standard just used "." for all member access and let the compiler work its magic and guess what needs to be done. Of course that would break a sizeable amount of legacy code, but who cares about that anyway. The important is that the cod…

I like the arrow since it reminds me sometimes that I'm working with a pointer and not an object on the stack

Re: Underscores are stupid

#53

Post by extension » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:18 PM UTC

Try binding shift-space to underscore. You'll start to feel much better about it.

Re: Underscores are stupid

#54

Post by foxhop » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:19 PM UTC

Bravo!

Also underscores in uri strings look awful.

this_uri_is_ugly.html

vs

this-uri-is-pretty.html

I wish python allowed for dash in its script names... cannot import from module-test.py but I can from module_test.py

Thank you for posting this, I "laughed-out-loud".

Re: Underscores are stupid

#55

Post by chris_wot » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:20 PM UTC

I program in Underscore, you insensitive clod!

Re: Underscores are stupid

#56

Post by davidcuddeback » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:22 PM UTC

caryme wrote: post #20

Interesting that he calles dashes "ordinary, easy-to-type, recognizable, [and] visually unambiguous." What he's referring to as a dash is actually a hyphen (-), which is pretty ambiguous when compared to the en dash (–) and em dash (—), both of which require modifier keys to type (and are frequently used in prose, to counter another of his claims). Fortunately, I've never seen em dashes or en dashes used in code.

He's discussing this in the context of writing code, not typography. I think it's fair to assume we're starting with the premise that we would only choose characters that are easily typed on common keyboards. Choosing uncommon characters in programming languages, such as en-dashes and em-dashes, is choosing to deliberately make our lives more difficult [1].

I think it's pretty clear from the article that his comments were meant to be taken in that context. If he'd chosen to preempt the pedantic readers by making that context explicit, it would have only diluted the article with noise that most people would rightly assume is implied by the context.

I don't know what your keyboard looks like, but mine doesn't have en- or em-dashes on it, and I wouldn't even consider them for a programming language syntax.

[1] Even when using en-dashes and em-dashes in prose, they can often be typed with multiple consecutive hyphens, e.g., '--' and '---' in LaTeX.

Re: Underscores are stupid

#57

Post by swah » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:25 PM UTC

Truly find-file is much more readable than findFile. IMHO. Also directory? vs isDirectory

Re: Underscores are stupid

#58

Post by rmk2 » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:31 PM UTC

> Underscores require me to hit the Shift key. When writing prose, I only hit the shift once or twice per sentence. In Ruby, I have to hit the shift key every few letters. Awkward. Inefficient.

Oh my, oh my, how do people ever cope with that vile "having to hit shift" that have regular capitalisation of all nouns etc. Surely such a thing is impossible, as is hitting shift when you need an underscore.

I understand that some things could be more efficient, but "hitting shift" hardly qualifies in my opinion...

Re: Underscores are stupid

#59

Post by whatevr » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

repeat after me.

die lisp die.

die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.die.

Re: Underscores are stupid

#60

Post by darrikmazey » Tue, May 15, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

I for one love it when someone types whole paragraphs about the desire to avoid keystrokes. Every language has it's irritating quirks, none of which do I care enough to write about.