[klibertp]

> I kept having to go back to the documentation to remember

1. Why would you want to remember this? It's in the docs. If you use it often, you'll learn it eventually. If you don't, you have no need to remember this. Don't burden your memory unnecessarily.

2. A well written and searchable documentation adds very little overhead anyway, on the order of a few seconds. Yeah, writing from memory is faster, but not by that much, and that advantage disappears almost completely if you have good auto-completion and docs support in your editor.

3. There are hundreds of languages out there, even if you learn the library of one language, it doesn't help with other languages at all. Learning to quickly search reference docs, along with learning some basic concepts/assumptions of each language, is much more sustainable if you're thinking of becoming polyglot.

EDIT: please, don't turn HN into Reddit, write a comment if you disagree, instead of downvoting.

[cyberferret]

I agree with you in principle. Over the past 4 decades, I have programmed in dozens of programming languages, and remembering things like FOR or CASE loop structures is almost impossible for me now, and I constantly refer to docs.

However, as a starting point for me, it would be easier if the languages all used a common naming convention for things like .upper() etc. Common mistake for me is to try .upper(), then .uppercase(), then have to leave my code and refer to the docs after repeated runtime errors. If I can make a reasonably intelligent guess within 2 or 3 tries, then it bodes well for me. Otherwise it is a productivity hit.

To extrapolate this - the corollary to .upcase() is, to my mind .lowercase(), but it is in fact .downcase(). Makes sense logically ('down' is the opposite of 'up'), but syntax wise, I never say to anyone "You need to write your username in down case...". If the naming conventions for functions followed the English language definitions, then my hit/miss ration will improve, and so will my productivity.

NB: I didn't downvote you (I can't anyway as I don't have the necessary karma to downvote immediate child answers to my posts). I thought you raised a valid point worthy of discussion.

[megaman22]

Or you use tooling that is aware of the syntax and available methods and can provide you live assistance and documentation at write time.

[klibertp]

> it would be easier if the languages all used a common naming convention for things like .upper() etc.

Well, it would definitely be easier if all the languages used the same conventions. The problem here, I think, is that all the possible conventions are arbitrary and objectively as good as any other, so there are many of them and settling on a single one across languages is not going to happen.

It's much more important to choose one convention for a language and to follow it everywhere - this improves guessability of identifiers in that language. The convention chosen may be familiar to you or not, but that doesn't mean the more familiar one is any better. So, I think, it's more important for a language to follow a single convention consistently, while choosing which convention to follow is less important.

That being said, I agree that it would be easier to learn new languages if they all followed a single standard for naming things, I just don't think it's going to happen.

> If I can make a reasonably intelligent guess within 2 or 3 tries, then it bodes well for me. Otherwise it is a productivity hit.

Agreed, but note that the 2-3 tries are informed by your experiences to date - someone with a different history of programming languages could find your guesses weird and would have completely different ones themselves.

Another thing, I agree on the productivity hit in principle, just want to note that there are ways of mitigating it. I use many languages regularly (I'm a hobbyist-polyglot, I learned at least 30-40 languages to varying degrees) and I think that a good editor integration (most notably "semantic auto-complete" and "inline docs") can make up for a lot of cases like the `upcase`. For example, if I write this (`|` is cursor position):

    a = "asd"
    a.up|

and hit <tab>, I get a popup with the suggestion of a correct name (`upper`) along with a bit of documentation. The level of support for this obviously varies a lot across languages, but where it's available I find it mostly fixes the problem of having to hit the docs too often.

> NB: I didn't downvote you

It's impossible to downvote immediate child posts, no matter the karma level, so it obviously couldn't be you :)

[ljw1001]

> it would be easier if the languages all used a common naming convention for things like .upper() etc.

It would be easier if everyone would just speak English all the time, but I'm not sure it would be better.