Underscores are stupid

Posted on
May 15, 2012

by
Avdi Grimm

I hate underscores. They are ugly. They are like the neon orange belt pack of syntax. Dated and unfashionable no matter what era they are found in. As the former owner of a neon orange belt pack, I feel I can speak with authority on this. Aesthetically speaking, underscores are one step shy of “C:\Progra~1“.

Only nerds even know what an underscore is. What’s the first thing I have to teach people who are brand new to programming? What the hell an underscore is, and where to find it on the keyboard. No, not that line. The other line. Hold down shift. There you go.

Underscores require me to hit the Shift key. When writing prose, I only hit the shift once or twice per sentence.  In Ruby, I have to hit the shift key every few letters. Awkward. Inefficient.

I’ve been thinking about rebinding the dash key to underscore in Emacs ruby-mode. It’s stupid that I’m even considering such a thing.

Underscores are visually ambiguous. When the font is underlined for some reason, the underscores get muddled up with the underlining. In badly-rendered text boxes it’s not always clear where the underscore leaves off and the bottom border begins.

CamelCase is no better. I still have to hit Shift all the time. Plus it relies on a peculiarity of the Latin family of languages.

Lisp gets it right. Lisp S-expressions have one basic rule that vastly simplifies the syntax: whitespace separates tokens. Always.

This means that “foo - bar” parses out to the three tokens “foo”, “-”, “bar”. Whereas “foo-bar” is a single token that happens to have a dash in the middle. That’s right, your tokens can have dashes in the middle. Ordinary, easy-to-type, recognizable, visually unambiguous dashes. Lisp functions have names like:

find-file

All you have give up for this is tightly-packed arithmetic statements, like this:

5*5-3

Instead, you have to give your tokens some breathing room:

5 * 5 - 3

That’s a trade-off I’ll gladly make if it means using dashed identifiers instead of underscores.

I mostly code in Ruby these days, and I love almost every aspect of its very rich syntax. But I hate all the snake_casing. I want a Ruby that lets me use dashes in identifiers. If I never type another underscore, it will be too soon.

UPDATE: The Recursive blog points out that Japanese keyboards may be more comfortable for typing Ruby.

Related posts:

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  2. Do, or do not. There is no #try.
  3. Treating Arrays as Sets
  4. Class.new and .inherited()
  5. Dumping Tabular Data with Hirb
This entry was posted in Rants. Bookmark the permalink.
  • David Brear

    why not just use camel case? thisWouldntMakeYouHappy because you still have to hit shift I guess.

    • robertodecurnex

      Plus it’s really ugly and hard to read…

    • http://avdi.org Avdi Grimm

      I addressed that in the post.

  • http://twitter.com/centipedefarmer Charles Hoffman

    You have to hit shift to type parens. ;)

    • http://avdi.org Avdi Grimm

      And you’ll note I didn’t say everyone should just use Lisp :-)

      • Patrick

        Ah, but you SHOULD have.

    • Ian

       No you don’t. At least in DrRacket, you can set the IDE to automatically replace [ and ] with ( and ). Any other competent editor should allow the same.

      • http://f5n.org/ Florian

        This assumes everyone is using US keyboard layout.
        Hint: We’re not :)

      • http://twitter.com/centipedefarmer Charles Hoffman

        You can also remap keys in emacs any way you like to avoid hitting shift so much: http://xenon.stanford.edu/~manku/dotemacs.html (look for the my-key-swap function)

  • http://twitter.com/mikewoodhouse Mike Woodhouse

    Of course, COBOL let you use dashes. Earlier versions even helped with casing: any case you wanted as long as it was upper…

  • Sanjay

    Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  • http://twitter.com/cassiomarques Cássio Marques

    I always  separate operators and operands using spaces for better readability, so I see no trade-offs here, only wins :)

  • Daniel Harrington

    nice rant :)

  • http://www.jonathan-jackson.net/ Jonathan Jackson

    I respectfully disagree.  Let me preface by saying some of why I disagree is simply personal preference.  Here goes: 

    Having to hold down the shift key can’t be that uncommon for someone writing ruby code (or pretty much any code).  Brackets, Parenthesis, any number of operators all require the pressing of the shift key.  

    You bring up a valid point about dasherized text.  It might be nice to have a bit more flexibility in our syntax, but I definitely believe its better than most alternatives. 

    Furthermore, if we were to implement a flexible system, one in which both dasherized and snake_case would be tolerated by the interpreter, we would risk splitting the common semantic patterns that have taken since Ruby’s birth to build.  A relatively recent example of this would be the new 1.9 hash syntax.  

    I might have more concerns but it mostly boils down to ‘I like it’.  

    *edit formatting*

  • franktisellano

    This is the perfect rant. Entertaining, slightly irrational, but reasonable enough to not be dismissed out of hand.

    (Also, the title is bitchin’.)

  • http://twitter.com/GavinStark Gavin Stark

    I wonder if you could create logic in your editor of choice (I assume either emacs or vim) so that if you type a dash as in snake-case it turns it into an underscore for you. Following the same rules of interpretation as your Lisp example. This would solve the problem of having to hold down the shift key but not the core style issue. 

  • flografle

    I don’t think it’s stupid to consider remapping keys. I was going to do an analysis of the code I’ve written and try and design a keyboard that works for me when programming.This does a quick analysis http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/

  • snake’s on the plane

    snakes_in_my_pants

  • http://twitter.com/toamit Amit Kumar

    I agree with you totally but there are cases like variable names etc… what do you think about them ?

  • http://twitter.com/arcandros Vassilis Rizopoulos

    Can I point out your cultural bias here? 
    Tongue in cheek of course!Imagine us poor Europeans having to deal with a multitude of different keyboard layouts.

    For example, the german layout will conveniently place the underscore right next to the right shift but will force you to press AltGr-Q for @ and AltGr-ß (ß being in place of – ) for with AltGr being the right Alt button.

    Coding with a german layout is a ballet of jumps and slides across the keyboard :P

    At the same time, the swiss layout, having to accomodate three languages (german, french and italian) goes completely overboard. But I think the one I could never get used to is the croatian one.

    • Jose Dinuncio

       I hear you! I currently have a latin-america keyboard. In Spanish we have only three more symbols than English: ñ, acute-accent (á) and direresis (ü). Simple, the keyboard designers just had to add two more keys. But what did they do? The moved every fricking symbol, added ¬, and 1/2 and other useless cr*p

  • Brennan Cheung

    Sometimes it is easier if you can use symbols to differentiate tokens instead of whitespace.  The dash is used for the arithmetic minus operator.

    If you could only use whitespace for separating tokens then2*(b-a)
    becomes
    2 * ( b – a )It is really annoying to have to keep pressing space all the time.

    • Michael Better

      If you’re going to press one key a lot, don’t you think that the huge key under both of your thumbs would be a pretty good choice?

  • Justin

    God forbid you ever use a { C } like language. All those mustaches/curly-brackets/braces oi! And Lisp with all those ( paren )’s! And certain dialects of SQL that love those [ square ] brackies!

    Ergh, sorry. What I meant to say is that you’ll never get away from shift. Not as long as people still use punctuation of any type.

    Hmmm. You could also get  a DVORAK keyboard. Then shift would feel normal.

    • Justin

       I just realized that [ square ] brackets don’t need shift. You should become a MS-SQL DB administrator.

      • Zecc

        In many (most?) keyboard layouts you don’t need shift for square brackets, it’s true. You need Alt+Gr instead.

  • http://mwilden.blogspot.com Mark Wilden

    I’ve often wondered why we can’t use whitespace in identifiers. This can’t be an insurmountable language design problem.

    For example

     if number of animals > 12

    instead of

     if animal_count > 12
     if animalCount > 12
     if animal-count > 12

    Just a thought.

    • Robin

       Some languages do allow it, I forget which. They usually have string-like syntax to have no ambiguity as to what is delimited, but I guess you technically wouldn’t need that.

    • Alan

      There is a character, NON-BREAKING SPACE (U+00A0), which looks like a space but is different from a normal space character (U+0020).  In some languages, you might be able to write “number of animals” with non-breaking spaces and have it work.

      From a brief glance, it looks like this wouldn’t work in Python (ASCII only) or Java (letter-like characters only), but might well work in Ruby 1.9 (not sure) and Lisp (e.g., with SBCL).

      For the languages which don’t support this, there’s no technical reason they couldn’t, of course, but Python and Java are somewhat known for making the programmer do things their way, and invisible characters in identifiers is not their way.  :-)

      • Alan

        Of course, this doesn’t solve all of his original issues, since then you’d just be typing option-space instead of shift-minus, but it might look prettier.  Especially if you set up your IDE to style them (like with a subtle background color), so that you could tell where one identifier ended and the next began.  Otherwise a line like “if check something list foo bar” could have many possible (human) interpretations, and just lead to more confusion.

        • Michael Kopinsky

          Thank you for posting this publicly, online. If I ever come across code that uses non-breaking spaces as part of variable names, I will know who to hunt down.

  • JayWilmont

    this_is_easier to read than-this-is 

    QED

    P.S. If you use an editor that auto-completes (like Sublime Text) then you rarely have to type more than the first few characters of a variable name.

    • http://ghettoco.de/ John Ford

      I absolutely agree. In the spirit of “writing code that’s easy for the next developer (who may be yourself in 6mos)”, I think we should be willing to make the sacrifice of an extra shift in exchange for easier readability.  

      Dashes just don’t visually stand out enough for the eye/brain to simply scan an expression and automagically parse it.  They’re like speed-bumps which cause you to slow down and “manually” determine where the token begins and ends.

      Since code is going to be read way more often than it’s written, I’m in favor of underscores vs dashes.  I can massage and rest my weary pinkies (from all that shifting) while I leisurely read through code.

      • http://avdi.org Avdi Grimm

        Funny, I find the underscore version much more visually jarring. I’m used to seeing dashes in prose; they tie concepts together. Underscores? Not so much.

        • http://ghettoco.de/ John Ford

          The tying together thing is what makes it hard for me.  My whole reason for wanting a dash/underscore is to separate the words for the reader, yet keep as a unit for the machine.  I guess different people “see” things differently. (BTW, Thanks a lot.  Now I’m going to spend my entire lunch break wondering if my “blue” is the same as your “blue”!)

    • http://avdi.org Avdi Grimm

      No. No, it really isn’t.

      • http://twitter.com/obfuscurity Jason Dixon

        I disagree.

    • Alan

      Not to me, it isn’t.  (Or rather, in this case it is only because your comment is a variable-width font, which nobody would use for viewing source code.)

      (Or would that have been easier to read if I’d said variable_width font?)

  • http://twitter.com/aaronbassett Aaron

    > visually unambiguous dashes 
    Really? Then please identify (by eye) which one below is the Hyphen.

    find−filefind–filefind‐filefind¯filefind—filefind⁃filefind―file

  • Whatever

    Lispers should just die like lisp

  • pixeltrix

    You could always use an en dash:

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    # encoding: utf-8
    foo–bar = “Hello World”
    puts foo–bar

  • http://leonid.shevtsov.me Leonid Shevtsov

    This can be trivially fixed in Vim by using a bunch of abbreviations such as “iab a- a_” to “iab Z- Z_” 

  • Pingback: Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » Speculation about the origin of CamelCase

  • https://me.yahoo.com/callmemisscleo#503b4 misscleocallmenow

    object . call ( parameter , other ) do | thing |

  • sayap

    Both editors I use regularly (Komodo Edit and SciTE) treat “foo_bar” as one token for things like double-click-selection and auto-completion, and “foo-bar” as three tokens. This is why I have to side with underscore in the debate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1686337/hyphens-or-underscores-in-css-and-html-identifiers

  • http://profiles.google.com/russell.ballestrini Russell Ballestrini

    Bravo!

    Also the underscore in a URI strings appear strikingly awful.

    The presence of an underscore within a URI appears esthetically repulsive.

    Examples:

    http://www.foxhop.net/this_uri_is_ugly

    vs

    http://www.foxhop.net/this-uri-is-pretty

    Python suffers more than Ruby from the underscore plague:

    __init__() # a constructor

    _varible = ‘potato’ # a conventionally private variable

    Also in python the dash is NOT allowed in script names…

    We cannot import from module-test.py but we can from module_test.py

    Thank you for posting this, I “laughed-out-loud”.  Yes, I used dashes just now.

  • http://twitter.com/macmnc Robbie drbob Straw

    Personally I’d much rather use underscores than add spaces to arithmetic expressions.

    Also to this day I still don’t use spaces in my filenames because shells are fucking insane when it comes to handling spaces in paths.

    Also I’m not sure why being a modified key is a bad thing; given that curly brackets and parens are both modified keys on QWERTY.
    That being said: you have a point that they’re ambiguous when being used with an underlined font. To that I must ask: when/where have you ever seen underlined Ruby code?To my knowledge I can’t even apply an underline style in TextMate.

  • http://evanreeves.myopenid.com/ JadedEvan

    DVORAK layouts makes this slightly less painful.

  • http://twitter.com/HairyFotr HairyFotr

    Write yourself a pre-processor… it should be easy enough in this case.

  • Tom

    If it bothers you that much, change your keyboard layout.

  • needs

    On an azerty keyboard, you haven’t to hit Shift to type an underscore. I agree with you, Lisp get it right, except that find_file is easier to read than find-file.

  • http://toxik.myopenid.com/ LE

    In this post, the author says that having the line half the line height above baseline is much better than on the baseline.

    Really, this is considered Hacker News?

    • http://avdi.org Avdi Grimm

      I never post my stuff to HN; I’d suggest you take your complaints over there.

  • Tim Macfarlane

    Hi Avdi – have a look at pogoscript (http://pogoscript.org/)

  • http://twitter.com/tobytripp Toby Tripp

    glasses-mode does a decent job of correcting camelCase, adapt it for snake_case too?

    I have no sympathy for the typing complaints.

  • http://dockyard.com Brian Cardarella

    Bike shedding!

  • Par Trivedi

    sounds like you havent been programming for very long son!

  • http://progeny.myopenid.com/ Pierre

    I don’t mind the underscore. However, I agree with the extra spacing for breathing room. “5*5-3″ is an abomination. The cramped format makes it harder to scan visually.

  • Trollol

    You’re stupid! :P

  • otikik

    Well, I hate colons. Especially Double::Colons.
    And the & syntaxt to denote blocks passed as parameters.Both syntax elements seem like a like a special case made a bit too explicit – not as well-rounded as the rest of the language. Probably they look like that because I don’t know the underlying reasons well enough. But they still look a bit “rough”.But the underscores? I find they are a good balance between utility, legibility and ease of use.

  • http://profiles.google.com/davearonson Dave Aronson

    “Give up” tightly-packed arithmetic statements?  Oh puh-leez.  That’s like asking us to “give up” waiting half a minute for our environment to load, or “give up” inheriting steaming mounds of code.  Those who want to pack things tightly and save characters can go hack Perl.  (Or, seeing as ancient languages like COBOL have already been mentioned, perhaps APL.)

    • Tom Macklin

      So am I to take it then that you’ve given up your camel case fettish ;)

  • Kurt Werle

    2 points:
    * You use emacs and you’re complaining about using modifier keys!?
    * You use emacs and you type more than the first few characters of a variable before autocomplete kicks in?

    That’s quite a rant you’ve got, there :-)

  • Jheriko

    “Lisp gets it right.”

    I love whitespace, but I hate Lisp’s use of ‘-’… camel case is much preferable imo, years of reading English, C and C++ mean that I naturally parse a-b as ‘a’ ‘minus’ ‘b’.

    I do like the whitespace enforcement though – I always write ‘a – b’ in code when I can. spacing out tokens helps readability – its something I never would have started doing if coding standards hadn’t forced it upon me. :)