On Language, On CamelCasing

3 December, 2009

In the (wonderful) NYT blog On Language, Caleb Crain discusses the history of camel casing (using upper letters in the middle of conjoined words ) text that he believes led to Apples use of the iconic "i" product names.

He ends by saying:

It doesn't have to be this way. Put some distance between you and your Master Card; don't let your Iphone make the rules. You don't have to buy their language. It already belongs to you.

The piece does a great job of outlining the history of the technique and it's short lived benefit and later issues, but he neglects what might have been one of Apples biggest influences: programming languages. Most computer languages see a space as a denotation of two separate entities, so say someone was describing a "blue icon" a that would be seen as two separate things: blue and icon.

So programmers have a choice;

use an underscore: blue_icon,
dash: blue-icon or
camel case: blueIcon.

And many programmers choose to camel case (many use some of each technique, depending on the circumstance ).

The irony in Crain's argument, that camel casing isn't very readable, is that programmers do it for that very reason. And camel cased words stand out in code - I have no idea of why that is, but they do.

So, when apple in 1996, was picking a name for the iMac, and someone - who was probably at least a part time programmer, said "how about iMac," he wasn't just adding a lowercase "i" at the beginning to be cute, he was referencing a convention that has a long standing, and appropriate history of use.