Comment by jppope

Comment by jppope 2 days ago

7 replies

Language evolves. Capitalization is an artifact of a period where capitalizing the first letter made a lot of sense for the medium (parchment/paper). Modern culture is abandoning it for speed efficiency on keyboards or digital keyboards. A purist would say that we should still be using all capitals like they did in Greek/Latin which again was related to the medium.

I'll likely continue using Capitalization as a preference and that we use it to express conventions in programming, but I totally understand the movement to drop it and frankly its logical enough.

bicx 2 days ago

It's slower for sure, but capitalization does impart information: beginning of sentences, proper nouns, acronyms, and such. Sure, you could re-read the sentence until you figured all that out, but you are creating unnecessary hitches in the reading process. Capitalization is an optimization for the reader, and lack of capitalization is optimization for the writer.

  • jppope 2 days ago

    Its just a convention. You just get used to it. Whether we like it or not, written language is heading that way. Readers don't generally read letters in words anyway, they read the whole word after a certain literacy level has been achieved.

  • meowface 2 days ago

    I think capitalization will slowly go by the wayside in most media, but one hill I'll always die on is punctuation. "i'll go" vs. "ill go"... the latter is just too crude. Many gen Z/alpha do omit it, though.

sodapopcan 2 days ago

As much as I dislike it sometimes, language absolutely does evolve. Proper capitalization does not fit into this, though. It can completely change the meaning of something if it is not capitalized. It's not just at the beginning of sentences, it's proper nouns within a sentence. Unfortunately I don't have an example of this handy but it's happened to me several times in my life where I've been completely confused by this (mostly on Slack).

This is a merely showing off your personal style which, when writing a technical article, I don't care about.

  • Gormo 11 hours ago

    > As much as I dislike it sometimes, language absolutely does evolve.

    Pointing out that language evolves helps to explain how the current established conventions came to be, but it is not an argument that there are (or should be) no established conventions.

    If you are speaking in a way that diverges from what most people understand, then you are miscommunication and are making demonstrable errors precisely because the language has evolved into what it currently is, and not something else.

fc417fc802 a day ago

> we use it to express conventions in programming

Interestingly programming is the one place where I ditch it almost entirely (at least in my personal code bases).

  • scubbo a day ago

    Be thankful you haven't encountered the clusterfuck that is the Go Language :P