Lindsay Marshall wrote:

OK, but i personally never meet a programmer complaining about this, so i suppose that most people get used to underscore in a short period.



Pleased to meet you - I hate them and moan about them when people use them.


Pleased to meet you to :-)

They are much harder to type.


I don't care. I writte code once and read it many times (and other people to). This is true even for script.

On the other hand, you will always need some effort to understand identifiers without spaces, and I think this is a much bigger problem.


Use short identifiers. I hate long identifiers too - they just make code unweildy and hard to read.


Without underscore, i would do that to.

So i suggest a simple experiment : let's compare the average speed to read some short story
1 - with all blanks removed,
2 - with all blanks replaced with _,
by two groups of peoples with no programming background.



How is this relevant?


Code is not a story. If your code is well written then the variable names are all quite different so easily recognised. Spaces act in code act slightly differently from spaces in narrative text I would maintain.

This is relevant. Doing this experiment with non programmers on a natural text avoids programming culture impact, rest of the langage syntax impact, and amplify the result for just that point : time to understand Identifiers (BTW, this is not limited to variable, but also operation, package, etc. depending on your langage).
And it's part of the readability.


Even if it were relevant your test is unfair as you have forgotten to capitalise the starts of all the words


- you need to show where the breaks are in english orelseitbecomesslightlyhardertoread orEvenAmbiguousIfYouAreNotCareful. (No, I can't be bothered to make up an ambiguous sentence but I'm sure you can see what I mean)



No no, i just forgot to mention it. Whitout capitalization, difference will be about 900% :-)

--
Lionel Draghi                        http://swpat.ffii.org/index.fr.html



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