DAVEBLOG 5000

So, the “Ruby way” is to use underscores to delimit most identifiers, e.g. “add_months_to_date“, as opposed to the Java camel-case way of “addMonthsToDate“. This was initially something that irked me about Ruby, mostly because typing an underscore is kindof a pain (shift with the left hand and pinky with the other).

Now that I’ve started working, I’ve been reading a lot of code and realizing that code is more often read than written. Ultimately, camel case is a just lot harder to read (especially if you create meaningful method names like myself and my co-workers seem to do).

It’s pretty hard to defend:

Date calculatePersonDataUsageHistoryStartDate() {}

as more readable than:

def calculate_person_data_usage_history_start_date()
end

The underscores are like spaces, making the identifier a lot more readable. Of course, both are more readable than:

// Calculates the start date of the
// person's data usage history
time_ prsn_dt_uhst_st_dt(){}

This would never fly with Java (and, honestly, look a bit weird), but I’m no longer gonna curse the Ruby convention.

Tags: java, ruby

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.