Daniel Fischer
Am Dienstag 15 Dezember 2009 03:04:43 schrieb Richard O'Keefe:
On Dec 14, 2009, at 5:11 PM, Daniel Fischer wrote:
1. I wasn't playing in the under_score vs. camelCase game, just proposing a possible reason why the camelCase may have been chosen for Haskell's standard libraries.
But the insanely abbreviated example did not provide such a reason.
Of course not. But if you expand it - and it's not difficult, even when insanely abbreviated -, the resulting sentence gives a possible reason: "Maybe it's because the underscore style is considered far uglier and less readable by others." If the early Haskellers felt that way, isn't it perfectly natural that they chose the camelCase style?
As one of the early Haskellers, I definitely preferred underscores, because my intuition told me that it was closer in appearance to normal English¹ text, and my belief was that even programmers read more English than code. Unfortunately I'm not a very persuasive person, and couldn't argue my case (beyond having underscores /permitted/). The problem is that once people have spent some time using one style or other, their ability to self-analyse their reading of it becomes negligible. "Ugly" and "less readable" become synonymous with "not the style I'm used to", irrespective of actual effects on reading speed. And introspection is a notoriously bad method of anyalysing psychological factors in the first place. This really should have been decided with proper experiments.
Of course, they may have had entirely different reasons, or no concrete reason at all and it just happened.
In the absence of hard data, it only takes a slight bias in exposure among members of the committee to tip a decision the wrong way. [1] and quite a high proportion of other natural languages. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk