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How many man years are wasted with western naming convensions?

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

#31

Post by raverbashing »

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?

I mean, they're already using Hungarian notation wrong[1], if you want painless translations use a language that allows for reflection and use smarter naming conventions

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

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

#32

Post by thaumasiotes »

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 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

Right, because that's the difficult part. Memorizing 100 alphabets is significantly easier than memorizing the relevant Chinese characters. The syllabaries are zero percent of the difficulty of learning to read Japanese.

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

#33

Post by Arnavion »

oaiey wrote: post #28
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.

In a universe where Chinese or Japanese were the prominent languages for program identifiers, there wouldn't be a requirement to fit into 128 characters in the first place. The dominant charset would probably be GB2312 / Shift-JIS which are multi-byte.

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

#34

Post by rob74 »

My answer: not as many by far as are/were wasted with various character encoding standards and the problems involved in converting between them. Fortunately Unicode is slowly making that a thing of the past, but brings with it new issues (combining characters anyone?)

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

#35

Post by est31 »

The way Rust solves this inconsistency issue is by having a bunch of builtin style lints, that 95% of Rust code follows. The key word here is builtin, as in, they existed since 1.0 and are enabled in the compiler by default. You still have to deal with different naming conventions, but they only exist when you interface with some existing component/API.

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

#36

Post by V-2 »

What is missing is some evidence (by which I mean ANY shred of evidence, not necessarily a full-scale research; could be circumstantial) that coders whose native languages lack the concept of upper/lower case ACTUALLY struggle more with this aspect of programming.

For what it's worth, we've had quite a few languages that only used upper case. Off the top of my head, FORTRAN or COBOL, but I believe it was pretty much the standard up until a point. Was it beneficial? Was there a detectable drop in productivity among programmers of Japanese/Korean/... origin once this trend reverted, and case-sensitive languages took over?

The article offers some food for thought, but objectively it does a better job riding the wave of current intellectual climate (inadvertently, perhaps) than producing a convincing argument in favor of the hypothesis.

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

#37

Post by shultays »

myrion wrote: post #21
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.

    English underuses it
You mean it underuses capitalization? What are the examples in other languages that uses for other purposes?

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

#38

Post by lmm »

Hamuko wrote: post #6

I'd dread to think of what naming conventions would look like if they were modeled after Japanese. You can write the same exact word as ひとごみ, 人ごみ, 人込み, 人混み, 人込, or even ヒトゴミ if you're feeling bold.

On the other hand, maybe we'd be forced to actually confront those equivalences and make languages that accommodate them.

Research has shown that the lowest hanging fruit in programming language design would be to make names case-insensitive - allowing you to have two variables that differ only in case causes far more problems than it solves. But, programming being a pop culture, no-one dares.

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

#39

Post by wanderingstan »

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?

Like many things that evolved slowly over time, there isn’t a single clear reason for the upper/lower case distinction.

The distinction began as a mixing of different writing styles (called “hands” in calligraphy), something similar to how we today will mix fonts in a document.

“Lower case” was the newer, more common font. (What wed today call uncial or Carolingian)

“Upper case” was a font based on older, Roman-era designs. This is why Roman monuments like the Trajan column appear to us as being in all capitals.

Using the older “font” at the beginning of sentences seems to have begun as stylistic choice, but perhaps with some purpose as a reading aid to identify sentence starts, somewhat in the same way we’ll use different fonts for headings. Note that punctuation (periods, question marks, commas, etc) was also evolving at around the same time and didn’t exist in Roman times.

Bold and italic also evolved from the mixing of different “fonts” within one text.

Wish I could find a better source, but this is what I’ve learned as a calligrapher over the years.

Some more info here: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/history-of-capital-letter...

Edit: the codification of upper/lower case took place in the Italian classical revival during the Renaissance. See: https://www.primidi.com/history_of_western_typography/classi...

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

#40

Post by jlnthws »

That's why we have conventions: to avoid wasting time arguing about which style to use here and there. I wasted more time reading this article than I will ever waste with lower/upper case naming issues.

By the way, Arabic has 4 letter forms, Japanese has 3 sets of characters, Chinese has 2 character forms, Vietnamese and some other romanized Asian languages have many diacritics (for the tones) which change the meaning of words,... Latin alphabet as it is used in English is by far the simplest of all (to use, teach or learn).

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