Hi,
I would like to talk about naming convention. I think it's fine to have
short names in a langage with few keywords such as C (memcpy), but a
langage such as Julia that wants to be also high level with a huge standard
library needs convention because the langage might become very large. I
find the convention used by Mathematica the best ever made. Nothing is
shortened except a few exceptions and consistent use of CamlCase. On the
other hand, Matlab is probably one of the worst thing that happen in terms
of naming: no consistency at all! I suspect that Cleve Moler who started
Matlab not used LAPACK but also the Fortran 77 naming convention which was
only there only for technical reasons ;-)
I've seen that the naming convention for function in Julia looks like the
same as in Python: everything must be lowercase, and don't use underscore.
Let's look at different naming conventions, the first one being the one
used by Julia.
1) daysinmonth()
2) daysInMonth()
3) days_in_month()
I find the first one the most difficult to read. I tend to prefer the last
one, but the second one is also easy to read. The fact that Julia uses the
first one and the fact that many names are shortened, makes reading code
with functions you've never seen a pain. For instance reading a name
"iso..." my mind does not understand if we at talking about a function that
returns a Bool ("is" suggests that) or something that has been standardised
(ISO). Using the second naming convention would make things easier. Also it
would prevent people using underscores as we have in the standard library
without any clear reason.
I don't find any disadvantage for the second naming convention over the
first one. So why do people use the first one?
