Talk:Snake case

{{WikiProject Computing|class=Start|importance=low}

Sourcing

Added section. —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 04:34, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I hate to be a killjoy for such a fun article as this one, but I think it doesn't really meet WP standards for sourcing. For "kebab-case" (which is a great name IMO), a stack overflow question is referenced, but the SO comments make it clear the WP citation was first. Is there any real authoritative sourcing on this? It looks like original research to me. Fool4jesus (talk) 15:38, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

kebab-case is pretty common nomenclature in the NodeJS community. Here's another use of it in a very well known project: https://lodash.com/docs#kebabCase 8.26.157.128 (talk) 02:04, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

It’s totally appropriate to insist on sourcing, especially for neologisms; earlier versions of this article and the referenced Stack Overflow one both had citogenesis, and even stated that this was an example of citogenesis! As of this edit and that edit I’ve moved the discussion of other naming conventions to naming convention (programming), where they below, briefly noted the non-standard terms here, and elaborated briefly there.

“snake_case” itself is well-attested and has a clear origin in 2004.

Interestingly, the Stack Overflow post in 2012 is the earliest cite I’ve found for “kebab-case”, and may be the origin. It has since gotten some broader use, including in print, and may become standard. Regardless, this is about snake_case, not kebab-case, so no extended discussion here.

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 04:45, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

Isn't Screaming snake case a variant on Kebab case?

In the example for screaming snake case "THIS_IS_AN_EXAMPLE", no hyphens are used as is normal in kebab case. Shouldn't it be "THIS-IS-AN-EXAMPLE"?

Reading more about the casing, I guess I'm wrong, but the text is a little confusing in how it jumps to a base variant. But maybe that's just me.M4bwav (talk) 20:39, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

You’re confused, but the naming is confusing.

snake_case originated in Ruby, as a term for lowercase_with_underscores, so by analogy with SCREAMING CAPS, some people (Ruby Style Guide: Naming) call UPPERCASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES by the name SCREAMING_SNAKE_CAPS. This hasn’t caught on as widely though, and has the traditional name MACRO_CASE, due to its use as macros for the C preprocessor.

Today UPPERCASE-WITH-DASHES is rare, though the most-suggested name I’ve seen is COBOL-CASE, since COBOL is well-known for using UPPERCASE, and also used dashes (this is noted at UnderscoreVersusCapitalAndLowerCaseVariableNaming). Alternatively, it could be called SCREAMING-KEBAB-CASE, but that seems unlikely.

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 05:01, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

websites using snake_case

mediawiki for example ...

the camelCase article also refs wiki file names.

quote:

several popular APIs (Facebook, Netflix, StackExchange, etc.) are using underscores in all parts of the URI.

from here

rule of thumb: use snake_case only for variable names and function names, join 'content words' with a hyphen.

most indexers ('search engines') will tokenize foo_bar into one word, but hello-worlds into two words.

Milahu (talk) 09:43, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Another Sourcing Complaint---Wikipedians trying to form their own terminology

Wikipedia seems to suffer from this idea that all you need to do is create a page with loose references, and others will eventually follow which lends tacit credibility to the page existing in the first place.

Wikipedia cannot simultaneously posit itself as an encyclopedia of merit while also disguising mere reports of forum colloquialisms as actually credible sources.

This is one more case of someone wanting to invent a term out of nothing. The very first reference (one to a study published in the IEEE) doesn't call it "snake case" but refers to it as "under_score". But people don't generally read through every last citation given before writing articles that point to this page. They simply use the page. 𝓦𝓲𝓴𝓲𝓹𝓮𝓭𝓲𝓪𝓘𝓼𝓝𝓸𝓽𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓻𝓡𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀𝓮𝓭-𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓻𝓡𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀𝓮𝓭𝓜𝓮𝓪𝓷𝓼𝓡𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀𝓮𝓭𝓑𝔂𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓻𝓼𝓞𝓷𝓵𝔂 (talk) 13:12, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

That’s how language evolves. Peter Flass (talk) 22:42, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Case of letters

The article states "the first letter of each word is written in lowercase." Are not all letters in snake_case lower case? If so ... — Preceding unsigned comment added by MichaelRpdx (talk • contribs) 16:23, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I suspect it means "at least the first letter" because if it said "all letters", that would require additional evidence. Even as it is, I doubt its accuracy: put_HTML_code_here looks valid to me. So I reverse your question and ask "where is the evidence that 'the first letter of each word is written in lowercase'"? In Python, yes it is but can it be said to be generally true? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:21, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

History

I suspect PL/I may be the first language to use this convention, but I couldn’t find any sources. PL/I pre-dates C by a decade, and it doesn’t appear that any of the ALGOLs use the underscore or break character (I obviously haven’t checked all implementations). COBOL uses - (dash or hyphen) and I think early FORTRAN uses only upper-case letters. Someone mentioned it’s used in LISP, but LISP 1.5 from 1962 doesn’t mention it. BCPL doesn’t seem to have it either. What languages am I missing? Peter Flass (talk) 22:41, 12 November 2023 (UTC)