Underscores are stupid

Re:Underscores are stupid by oligophagy on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @10:37AM (#3976751)

  All you have give up for this is tightly-packed arithmetic statements, like this:

    5*5-3

  Instead, you have to give your tokens some breathing room:

    5 * 5 - 3

I don't know, that seems pretty stupid too.

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Re:Underscores are stupid by pilot_pirx on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @10:50AM (#3976814)

and gets even worse if you bring variables into the game.

a = 5

b = 3

everybody from nearly every programming language would expect that after

c = a-b

you will find c to be 2 not nil (or throwing an exception or whatever)

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Re:Underscores are stupid by nessus42 on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:26AM (#3976983)

I never pack my code like that without whitespace, as doing so is only readable when you have single-letter variables, which is not very common.

I agree with the OP. CamelCase and underscores are both scourges.

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Re:Underscores are stupid by haukur on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:18AM (#3976941)

I've always found code without spaces around these symbols to be very undreadable.

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Re:Underscores are stupid by pilot_pirx on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:26AM (#3976976)

Yes, but in this case it's not about readability, but about extremely significant whitespace. Forgetting a space and your code has a totally different meaning.

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Re:Underscores are stupid by xyzzyb on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:37AM (#3977051)

Whitespace is already extremely significant in programming. "foo[1]" vs "foo [1]" for example.

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Re:Underscores are stupid by pilot_pirx on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:48AM (#3977119)

Depends on language, in Ruby those statements would be identical. But anyway, that's no reason to make things even worse.

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Re:Underscores are stupid by mbrubeck on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @11:55AM (#3977155)

In Ruby those statements are the same when foo is bound to an array, but they are different when foo is bound to a function...

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Re:Underscores are stupid by megablast on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:04PM (#3977201)

And I have found the opposite. Horses for courses.

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