Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

games.greggman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#21

Post by myrion »

lordnacho wrote: post #20

What exactly is the reason people started to have upper and lower case letters? I found a few articles about this appearing in the middle ages, but there doesn't seem to be a reason that makes sense. Seems to add nothing to the language, wtf is the point of the first letter being a capital anyway, and rules about various words that have to have caps?

Legibility. It is a significant improvement, and it still bothers me that English underuses it, even after years of it being my primary reading language.

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#22

Post by [deleted] »

lordnacho wrote: post #20

What exactly is the reason people started to have upper and lower case letters? I found a few articles about this appearing in the middle ages, but there doesn't seem to be a reason that makes sense. Seems to add nothing to the language, wtf is the point of the first letter being a capital anyway, and rules about various words that have to have caps?

[deleted]

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#23

Post by rhizome31 »

geoalchimista wrote: post #8

The title seems to imply that this problem does not exist in languages not using Latin scripts. That's not true. Take Japanese for an example, when you have hiragana, katakana, and kanji to express the same idea (and not to mention a kanji typically have more than one way of pronouncing it), the problem is gonna be orders of magnitude more complex.

> Take Japanese for an example, when you have hiragana, katakana, and kanji to express the same idea

I'm sure you know this, but for readers who aren't familiar with Japanese, it might be worth saying that hiragana, katakana and kanji aren't strictly interchangeable. Sure you can use hiragana and katakana as a fallback when you cannot or don't want to use the kanji for various reasons, but normally in every situation there's a recommended script to use in order to write correct Japanese.

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#24

Post by tgv »

lordnacho wrote: post #20

What exactly is the reason people started to have upper and lower case letters? I found a few articles about this appearing in the middle ages, but there doesn't seem to be a reason that makes sense. Seems to add nothing to the language, wtf is the point of the first letter being a capital anyway, and rules about various words that have to have caps?

As the other comment says: readability. ALGOL-68 (infamously) allows spaces in identifiers, which makes the code look a bit more natural. C and it's descendants don't, so a logical recourse is using underscores, or --if that's too much typing-- switching capitalization. Pascal was at the forefront of this convention (weirdly enough because the language is case insensitive, I think).

Other conventions were added: e.g., a capital for a type name, m as a prefix for class members, and of course a leading _ as an indication of not being public (which comes from the unix linker/, IIRC).

Anyway, I think the answer to OP's question is a negative number.

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#27

Post by Arnavion »

shakow wrote: post #19

If we programmed in Chinese, one would need to know thousands of characters to write any decent-sized program; if we programmed in Japanese, one would need to master several alphabets , if we were to program in Hindi, the very shape of our characters would depend of the context... All in all, the upper/lower case problem does not seem to be that much of a waste of man-years.

>if we were to program in Hindi, the very shape of our characters would depend of the context...

Eh? What context-dependent-shape-changing are you referring to? Hindi has a very normal alphabet. There are vowels, consonants, and a bunch of special ligatures for some combinations of those that are technically optional and could be done without. Nothing changes according to "context".

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#28

Post by oaiey »

shakow wrote: post #19

If we programmed in Chinese, one would need to know thousands of characters to write any decent-sized program; if we programmed in Japanese, one would need to master several alphabets , if we were to program in Hindi, the very shape of our characters would depend of the context... All in all, the upper/lower case problem does not seem to be that much of a waste of man-years.

Especially considering that English ASCII fits into 128 characters including punctuation ... I do not want to start thinking how Chinese or Japanese fits into that.

In reality the ask is maybe: let us use 25 characters english without uppercase? Which we have in Basic and dozens of old style programming language however typically upper case.

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#29

Post by Macha »

shultays wrote: post #16
avian wrote: post #7

> Someone had to translate GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE into mMaxTextureSize. I fail to see how the fact that the Latin alphabet has upper and lower case is to blame for this. This is more about the coding standards the author has to abide to than anything else. If your coding standard would require you to name the property MMAXTEXTURESIZE instead of mMaxTextureSize, would there be any less busy work?

even if his coding standard allows GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE, I still don't see the point. One (original) GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE is a global constant and his limits.GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE is just a member. You will still need a "conversion" code for every constant there is. Notice all this busy work And the code that comes after that is same amount of work, except typing mMaxTextureSize instead of copy pasting GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZ…

And often I want to see where the member is using without seeing everywhere the global constant is.

And yes, all this can be fixed by using a context aware IDE, but so can OP's original problem.

Re: How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

#30

Post by guerrilla »

As others said, Japanese isn't remotely that simple but also many non-Western languages use Latin script. Anyway, hard to take someone complaining about notation seriously when they're simultaneously fine with a syntax as complicated and nonsensical as C++.
Post reply on HN