Re: CamelCase For Procedures Names

  • From: Yong Huang <yong321@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 22 May 2012 07:51:56 -0700 (PDT)

[Very off-topic!]
I wonder if it's true that people that regularly read Chinese or German (or 
ancient Latin) finds CamelCase less offending. In these languages, meaningful 
tokens (words in most languages, characters in Chinese) are often concatenated 
with no separators. Due to this constant subconscious training, CamelCase 
should not be a big issue, because the training is the more rigorous reading of 
"nocasewords". But I acknowledge that long CamelCase words are slower to read.

That leads to another point. A procedure name in programming code only (not a 
name for an Oracle database object, which is flattened to all capital unless in 
double quotes) is usually short. In illustrating the point that a CamelCase 
name is hard to read, people use very long names as examples in a 
sentence-context. For one, the extra brain power to read a short CamelCase name 
is minimal, and the brevity probably has the benefitial effect of focusing your 
eyesight into a dot or at least a solid token better than if the string 
contains underscores; in fact, the white space above "_" disrupts the image as 
a solid token. I believe the brain works better if the string only needs to be 
understood as a single solid token, and the shorter the string and the less 
white space, the more it becomes solid and closer to a dot.

Secondly, examples citing a long CamelCase string are sentences. The brain 
works differently when you're in linear sentence-reading mode. But in 
programming code reading mode, you don't literally read linearly, but back and 
forth, up and down, repeatedly. A token, as short as possible, as closer to a 
dot or solid spot as possible (but not too short to compromise its meaning), is 
desired in this context. Because of repeated non-linear reading, GetAreaSize() 
may take even less time for the brain to process than get_area_size() every 
time your eyes are on it.

Nevertheless, the differences stated above are small. Other rules become more 
important, consistent naming convention, etc.

Yong Huang


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