On planning an evaluation of the impact of identifier names on the readability and quality of smalltalk programs

Abstract

One of the long running debates between programmers is whether camelCaseldentifiers are better than underscore_identifiers. This is ultimately a matter of programming language culture and personal taste, and to our best knowledge none of the camps has won the argument yet. It is our intuition that a solution exists which is superior to both the previous ones from the point of view of usability: the solution we name sentence case identifiers allows phrases as nams for program entities such as classes or methods. In this paper we propose a study in which to evaluate the impact of sentence case identifiers in practice.