Name Styles

Posted on Mon 04 March 2024 in TDDA

This is just a bit of fun, but I've always been interested in the different kinds of names allowed, encouraged, and used in different areas of computing and data.

A few years ago, I tweeted some well-known naming styles and a collection of lesser-known naming styles. I was playing about with the same idea while thinking about metadata standards today and came up with this. Just as I often think one of the boxes on the uniqitous 2x2 "Boston-Box"-style matrices makes no sense, I think some of the boxes on the evil-good-lawful-chaotic breakdown (which I gather comes from Dungeons and Dragons make little sense, so forgive me if some of this looks slightly forced. But I think it's fun.

Evil-Good-Lawful-Chaotic 3x3 matrix classification of name styles. LAWFUL GOOD: CamelCase, dromedaryCase, snake_case.  NEUTRAL GOOD: kebab-case, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE.  CHAOTIC GOOD: Train-Case, SCREAMING-KEBAB-CASE.  LAWFUL NEUTRAL: Pascal_Snake_Case, camel Snake Case, flatcase, UPPERFLATCASE.  NEUTRAL: reservedcase_, private ish case.  CHAOTIC NEUTRAL: space case.  LAWFUL EVIL: double quoted case, single quoted case, __dunder_case__.  NEUTRAL EVIL: path/case.extended, colon:caseflatcase, path/case, endash-kebab-case, quoted embedded newline case.  CHAOTIC EVIL: teRRorIsT nOTe CAse, alternating_separator-case, curly double quoted case, curly single quoted case, unquoted embedded, newline case.