Mine, as so many other software companies rely on camel case for brand identity.  I knew as soon as I had to spell it out to the lady at ASIC that I was going to be spelling it out every time it is said in meat space.  I ‘spose that’s why the business card was invented.

I found this piece in the current New Scientist.  The one with Africa/Face on the cover.

It’s entertaining, if a little bit old hat to us tech folk, and talks to usability in URLs indirectly.  (emphasis mine)

CamelCase

What’s with the outbreak of bumpy words – or should that be BumpyWords?  Do BlackBerry, MySpace, YouTube and LinkedIn signal an attack on the English Language?

Don’t Panic.  They’re examples of CamelCase (or medical capitals, BiCapitalisatioin, CapWords and InterCaps) and they’re all about forming compound words by capitalizing each chunk to preserve its identity.  This produces “camel” words with a range of “humps”.

CamelCase has been around since the 1950s in a few brand names like CinemaScope.  But it was software engineers who really took CamelCase to their hearts, using it in their program-writing conventions, and developing two separate styles; UpperCamelCase (UCC) and lowerCamelCase (lCC).

It’s not hard to see why.  If you have to wade through lines and lines of programs day in, day out, it helps to be able to tell the difference between structural elements, functions, procedures and objects provided by the language, and the names of things programmers have defined themselves.  If it’s defined by a programmer, you can’t look it up in the manual; you have to find it in the program to work out what it does.

As soon as computer keyboards were revolutionised in the late 1960s to include upper and lower-case characters, happy programmers were suddenly able to make distinctions.  For example, while “switch” is a programming-language element, “switchAddressFields” would be defined by the programmer.  The latter is virtually unreadable when presented in all lower case (switchaddressfields).

CamelCase has now made it into the world of techie products and web services, but will it go totally mainstream?  Very possibly.

In the internet age, CamelCase seems to be surging because it’s not possible to put spaces into web addresses.  Many companies feel obliged to compress their names into (www.)OneBlockOfText(.com) to preserve brand identity across all formats and media.  And consider PricewaterhouseCoopers (note the combination of lCC and UCC) and GlaxoSmithKline.

Marketing Directors at Corel, whose products include WordPerfect, say CamelCase boosts readability.  Not only that, CamelCase brand names are easily turned into catchy typographic icons and are also easier to trademark, even if made up of words which may be tricky to trademark individually.

Should linguistic purists be affronted by this corporate styling?  Jim Wallace, president of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature (SPELL),  is sanguine.  “The use of such new names in daily commerce is no serious threat to the language.  We see no reason to shun them,” he says.

We wait with more than a little trepidation the break-out of a rival convention used by programmers:  underscore_delimited_names.

New Scientist, 27th Oct 2007, pg 58.

Jim Wallace may well be cheerfully confidant – what have contrived acronyms done for the language?, and I would not dare to ponder that SPELL may be a Backronym.

See ORCA - the Organisation of Really Contrived Acronyms for additionally sillyness... Actually, both the SPELL and ORCA sites are in desperate need of being pulled out of the 1990s 

Listening To:  Reggatta de Blanc, The Police