On 2014-04-24 14:59, Barry Warsaw wrote: > I will say this: the original preference for underscore_names in PEP 8 was > spurred by user studies some of our early non-native English speaking users > conducted many years ago. We learned that it was more difficult for many of > them to parse mixedCase names than underscore_names. I'm afraid I probably no > longer have references to those studies, but the difference was pronounced, > IIRC, and I think it's easy to see why. Underscores can be scanned by the eye > as spaces, while I'd hypothesize that the brain has to do more work to read > mixedCase names. A more recent set of studies show some mixedResults (ha ha). On a low-level reading task, the studies agree with yours in that mixedCase takes more time and effort; however, it appears to improve accuracy as well. On a higher-level comprehension task, mixedCase took less or the same time and still improved accuracy. Experienced programmers don't see too much of a difference either way, but inexperienced programmers see a more marked benefit to mixedCase. http://www.cs.loyola.edu/~binkley/papers/tr-loy110720.pdf That said, I can't vouch for the experiments or the analysis, and it isn't really germane to Chris' historical question. I mention it only because I had just run across this paper last night, so it was fresh in my mind when you mentioned studies on the subject. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco
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