Hello, The title of this post is "Moving Past a Squished Case Convention" not "Moving Pastas Quiche...". :)
The Julia standard library tends to use the "squishedcase" notation. Being concise is great for mathematical functions, like sin, cos, and ln. However, it is cognitively harder for people for "compound" function names; e.g. "searchsortedlast". Such a naming convention flies in the face of real programming experience. It makes programming harder for people. There are many sane ways to name functions. Lisps tend to use hyphens, others often use underscores. R libraries use a non-standard mix [1]. Interestingly, the Julia parser code itself uses hyphens; e.g. prec-assignment and prec-conditional: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/src/julia-parser.scm It would be a shame for squishedcase to persist as the language reaches 1.0. What are some possible ways to address this problem without breaking compatibility in the short-run? I see a possible solution. Choose a character and encourage its use to break apart words; e.g. -, _, or a middot (·) [2]. Make it highly recommended but non-breaking until 1.0. Deprecate functionsusingsquishedcase. Julia is great overall but lacking in this way. Let's make it better. Sincerely, David [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1944910/what-is-your-preferred-style-for-naming-variables-in-r [2] The middot is relatively unobtrusive and doesn't take up much space horizontally, e.g. search·sorted·last. It is also useful for variables representing compound units; e.g. N·m.
