CamelCase vs underscores: Revisited

It has been 2 years since I published “CamelCase vs underscores: Scientific showdown”, and it still is easily the most visited article on this blog. Yesterday alone it got 2,614 views thanks to a forum post on Y Combinator, pretty much suppressing my normal visit rates entirely. What is it that makes it such a hot topic? Honestly, it doesn’t interest me that much anymore since there are many more important ways by which to make your code more readable; note it is code comprehension we are talking about here, not how fast you can write code! Before I outlined how the entire discussion could be made obsolete by moving away from a textual representation of code, and in my previous post I related software design principles as an act of communication to the cooperative principle in Linguistics. Nonetheless, given the immense interest this article seems to be getting I feel it’s my obligation to report on follow-up research of the previously discussed paper “To camelcase or under_score” by Binkley et al. (2009) (PDF).

In “An Eye Tracking Study on camelCase and under_score Identifier Syles” by Sharif and Maletic (2010) (PDF) the previous study is replicated but deviates from it in a few points:

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