Does identifier casing really matter?

Question

FxCop thought me (basically, from memory) that functions, classes and properties should be written in MajorCamelCase, while private variables should be in minorCamelCase.

I was talking about a reasonably popular project on IRC and quoted some code. One other guy, a fairly notorious troll who was also a half-op (gasp!) didn't seem to agree. Everything oughta be in the same casing, and he quite fervently favored MajorCamelCase, or even underscore_separation.

Ofcourse, he was just a troll so I reckoned I'd just keep doing it the way I already did. Before I learned the above guidelines, I hardly even had a coherent naming style.

He got me thinking, though -- does stuff like this really matter?

Answer 1

If you don't care about long-term maintanability of your project (or consistency or readability) then no, casing (and coding conventions in general) don't really matter. Otherwise, they do matter. See this.

Answer 2

You need to make sure that your code is readable in the future. Please remember that you might want to pass the development of your application to someone else and this person will need to read and understand it. You could stop actively working on a project and return to it after a year - and be suprised that you have to read code carefully to understand how it works.

I believe it was Steve McConnell who said that specific naming style does not really matter (you could use anything you want as long as you are consistent) but this only applies when everyone working on the project agree with you.

In general it is better to adopt community-accepted coding styles where possible to facilitate code reuse and shorten learning curves.

Answer 3

Your specific coding style doesn't matter (much), so long as it is consistent throughout the project.

This improves readability and understanding, as if an identifier is named in a particular way, the reader can (hopefully) be confident as to what that naming style implies.

As regards CamelCase v underscores, etc: again, it's down to your coding convention. One approach which uses both is to apply a prefix with underscore to indicate the module in which the function, or file-scope/global variable, is used, e.g. Config_Update(), Status_Get().