One of the first developer jobs I had was programming in VB6 for a small business down the road. Up to that point I had been casually coding at school but this was my first exposure to “professional” development. To get the job I had to do a weeks worth of work and then get it reviewed by the boss. I thought I did a pretty good job until I got his review back and he criticized everything – in particular he ripped apart my naming conventions (or lack of them).
In memory of this event I thought I would post briefly on naming conventions / terminology. We have come a long way since the vb6 days.
Pascal Case – if you ever hear this it means that when forming a name of something, if we do it in Pascal Case we capitalize the first character of each “word”. Keeping in mind that a method name could be formed by many word. The following are examples…
- MethodName
- FunctionThatReturnsAValue
- MyNameIsMark
Camel Case – think of this as looking like a camel… it starts off small and then has bumps in it. The convention is to capitalize the first character of each word except the first word. The following are examples
- methodName
- functionThatReturnsAValue
- myNameIsMark
Screaming CAPS – a favourite of mine in the vb6 days of constants. Everything goes in Upper Case usually with underscores to identify different words. An example of this would be
- METHOD_NAME
- FUNCTION_THAT_RETURNS_A_VALUE
- MY_NAME_IS_MARK