Semicolons. Underscores. Spaces. Tabs. Every couple weeks it's some new minutiae profiled as the cause of all the world's problems. Don't people have better things to focus on than this?
Agreed! This really shouldn't be on HN front page.
Underscores are stupid
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Re: Underscores are stupid
#32disagree. like_underscores. concerns about using shift key seem misplaced & for those who have some form of birth defect that prevents use of two fingers simultaneously, keyboard remapping is easy.
Modifier keys cause strain that can lead to RSI.
Re: Underscores are stupid
#33I think they should make keyboards with the spacebar divided, and make the left half (or I guess the right if you're left-handed) into a shift key.
The Kinesis Advantage keyboard effectively does this, except the left half is for backspace. Since it has very conveniently placed modifier keys like ctrl under my thumbs, I remapped capslock to shift so that it's on the home-row.
Re: Underscores are stupid
#34disagree. like_underscores. concerns about using shift key seem misplaced & for those who have some form of birth defect that prevents use of two fingers simultaneously, keyboard remapping is easy.
I like 'em, too. What terrible ordeal that we must push the shift bar while typing.
Honestly, I've always found them to be more human readable than CamelCase.
Re: Underscores are stupid
#35I've been thinking about trying to find a reasonable way to map the underscore to shift+space, but I'm not sure if that would somehow break some application that expects otherwise. It also seems to be quite difficult to achieve on Windows without registry hacks (I presume it would be easier on Linux, but haven't tried it yet).
Re: Underscores are stupid
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always found code without spaces around these symbols to be very undreadable.
Yes, but in this case it's not about readability, but about extremely significant whitespace. Forgetting a space and your code has a totally different meaning.
Whitespace is already extremely significant in programming. "foo[1]" vs "foo [1]" for example.
Re: Underscores are stupid
#37After writing a decent amount of Clojure recently, underscores do seem ugly, but I think I find commas even more annoying. I can accept underscores for the reasons raganwald mentioned, but having to write [1, 2, 3] instead of just [1 2 3] bothers me more than it probably should.
Re: Underscores are stupid
#38Writing almost exclusively in a underscore-encouraging language like Python has numbed me to these issues.
With me as well, though it is getting slightly annoying to the people I work with that it's been transferring over into some of the PHP code I have to write.
Re: Underscores are stupid
#39[deleted]
Re: Underscores are stupid
#40Sorry, but when I read this article I was just thinking that some people seem to have just too much free time...