Can You Handle The Truth?

Finding the right startup partner can be tricky business but luckily William and I share ideas and goals about where we want to take JadeTower and Indie-Arcade. We also have a lot of complementary skills with enough overlap so we understand what the other one is talking about. Mostly.

Today though, a conversation came up which tests the bounds of true friendship between hackers—indentifier naming conventions. I innocently asked what conventions William prefered. He wisely responded that it depends on the context and language: CamelCase for Javascript, under_score for Ruby, and so on. Seeking to find his real preference, I asked him about HTML identifiers.

See HTML ids are where a true programmer’s naming style cannot be hid. There’s little restriction and a wide array of justifications can be presented since so many languages can be involved in web development.

He responded: “Can you handle the truth?”

“Sure, lay it on me.”

“Dashes.”

Pause

“The LISPer finally comes out,” I mutter.

Dashes?! Well, in William’s defence, CSS uses dashes so it’s a reasonable choice. Luckily we agreed Hungarian notation is an abomination, so the debate was able to end peacefully.