A Tired Hobgoblin

Alternate (Boring) Title: Why the Twisted coding standard is better than PEP8 (although you still shouldn't care)

People often ask me why Twisted's coding standard – camel case instead of underscores for method names, epytext instead of ReST for docstrings, underscores for prefixes – is "weird" and doesn't, for example, follow PEP 8.

First off, I should say that the Twisted standard actually follows quite a bit of PEP 8.  PEP 8 is a long document with many rules, and the Twisted standard is compatible in large part.  For example, pretty much all of the recommendations in the section on pointless whitespace.

Also, the primary reason that Twisted differs at all from the standard practice in the Python community is that the "standard practice" was almost all developed after Twisted had put its practices in place.  PEP 8 was created on July 5, 2001; at that point, Twisted had already existed for some time, and had officially checked in its first coding standard just a smidge over one month earlier, on May 2, 2001.

That's where my usual explanation ends.  If you're making a new Python project today, unless it is intended specifically as an extension for Twisted, you should ignore the relative merits of these coding standards and go with PEP 8, because the benefits of consistency generally outweigh any particular benefits of one coding standard or another.  Within Twisted, as PEP 8 itself says, "consistency within a project is even more important", so we're not going to change everything around just for broader consistency, but if we were starting again we might.

But.

There seems to be a sticking point around the camelCase method names.

After ten years of fielding complaints about how weird and gross and ugly it is – rather than just how inconsistent it is – to put method names in camel case, I feel that it is time to speak out in defense of the elegance of this particular feature of our coding standard.  I believe that this reaction is based on Python programmers' ancestral memory of Java programs, and it is as irrational as people disliking Python's blocks-by-indentation because COBOL made a much more horrible use of significant whitespace.

For starters, camelCase harkens back to a long and venerable tradition.  Did you camelCase haters-because-of-Java ever ask yourselves why Java uses that convention?  It's because it's copied from the very first object-oriented language.  If you like consistency, then Twisted is consistent with 34 years of object-oriented programming history.

Next, camelCase is easier to type.  For each word-separator, you have only to press "shift" and the next letter, rather than shift, minus, release shift, next letter.  Especially given the inconvenient placement of minus on US keyboards, this has probably saved me enough time that it's added up to at least six minutes in the last ten years.  (Or, a little under one-tenth the time it took to write this article.)

Method names in mixedCase are also more consistent with CapitalizedWord class names.  If you have to scan 'xX' as a word boundary in one case, why learn two ways to do it?

Also, we can visually distinguish acronyms in more contexts in method names.  Consider the following method names:

• frog_blast_the_vent_core
• frogBLASTTheVentCore

I believe that the identification of the acronym improves readability. frog_blast_the_vent_core is just nonsense, but frogBLASTTheVentCore makes it clear that you are doing sequence alignment on frog DNA to try to identify variations in core mammalian respiration functions.

Finally, and this is the one that I think is actually bordering on being important enough to think about, Twisted's coding standard sports one additional feature that actually makes it more expressive than underscore_separated method names.  You see, just because the convention is to separate words in method names with capitalization, that doesn't mean we broke the underscore key on our keyboards.  The underscore is used for something else: dispatch prefixes.

Ironically, since the first letter of a method must be lower case according to our coding standard, this conflicts a little bit with the previous point I made, but it's still a very useful feature.

The portion of a method name before an underscore indicates what type of method it is.  So, for example:

• irc_JOIN - the "irc_" prefix on an IRC client or server object indicates that it handles the "JOINED" message in the IRC protocol
• render_GET - the "render_" prefix on an HTTP resource indicates that this method is processing the GET HTTP method.
• remote_loginAnonymous - the "remote_" prefix on a Perspective Broker Referenceable object indicates that this is the implementation of the PB method 'loginAnonymous'
• test_addDSAIdentityNoComment - the "test_" prefix on a trial TestCase indicates that this is a test method that should be run automatically. (Although for historical reasons and PyUnit compatibility the code only actually looks at the "test" part.)

The final method name there is a good indication of the additional expressiveness of this naming convention.  The underscores-only version – test_add_dsa_identity_no_comment – depends on context.  Is this an application function that is testing whether we can add a ... dissah? ... identity with no comment?  Or a unit test?  Whereas the Twisted version is unambiguous: it's a test case for adding a D.S.A. identity with no comment.  It would be very odd, if not a violation of the coding standard, to name a method that way outside of a test suite.

Hopefully this will be the last I'll say on the subject.  Again, if you're starting a new Python project, you should really just go ahead and use PEP 8, this battle was lost a very long time ago and I didn't even really mind losing it back then.  Just please, stop telling me how ugly and bad this style is.  It works very nicely for me.

The Lexicology of Personal Development

These days, everybody talks about geeks.  Geek chic, the "age of the geek"; even the New York Times op-ed page has been talking about the rise of "geeks" for years.  Bowing to popular usage, even I use the word as it's currently being bandied about.  But I think that the real success story is that of nerds.

A pernicious habit I've noticed in the last decade of the growth of geek culture is that it has developed a sort of cargo-cult of meritocracy.  Within the self-identified "geek" community, there's a social hierarchy based on all kinds of ridiculous pop-culture fetishism.  Who knows the most Monty Python non-sequiteurs?  Who knows the most obscure Deep Space Nine trivia?  This is hardly a new thing – William Shatner famously complained about it on Saturday Night Live in 1986 – but the Internet has been accelerating the phenomenon tremendously.  People who had a difficult time in their teens find each other as adults through some fan-club interest group, and then they make fast friends who had similar social problems.  Soon, since that's the shared interest that they know all their friends from, they spend all their time in the totally fruitless pursuit of more junk related to some frivolous obsession.  That can be okay, almost healthy even, if the focus of this accumulation is a productive hobby. However, if it's just a pop-culture franchise (Harry Potter, Star Trek, World of Darkness) what was originally a liberating new social landscape can rapidly turn into a suffocating, stale dead-end for personal development.

So I always feel a twinge when I identify myself as a "geek".  I usually prefer to say that I am - or at least aspire to be - a nerd.

A nerd is someone who is socially awkward because they are more thoughtful, introspective, intelligent or knowledgeable than their peers.  They notice things that others don't, and it makes interaction difficult.  This is especially obvious in younger nerds, where they're a little above their age group's intelligence but not quite intelligent enough to know when to keep their mouths shut to avoid ostracism.  But, even if they have learned to keep a lid on their less-popular observations, it's tough to constantly censor yourself and it makes interaction with your peers less enjoyable.

A geek is someone who is socially awkward because they are obsessed with topics that the mundanes among us just don't care about that much. They collect things, whether it's knowledge, games, books, toys, or technology.  Faced with a popular science fiction movie, a nerd might want to do the math to see whether the special effects are physically plausible, but a geek will just watch it a dozen times to memorize all the lines.

A dork is just socially awkward because they just aren't all that pleasant to be around.  Nerds and geeks have trouble with interacting with others because they're lost in their own little worlds of intellectual curiosity or obsession: dorks are awkward because, let's face it, maybe they're a little stupid, a little mean, and just not that interesting.  A dork is unsympathetic.

By way of a little research for this post, I discovered that I'm apparently not the only one who has this impression of the definitions, and even Paul Graham seems to agree with me on word choice.  Still: from here on out, these are the correct definitions of the words, thank you very much.

Maybe you've heard these definitions before, and this is all old news. Also, these are words for the sort of tedious taxonomy of people that fictional teenagers in high-school movies do.  It's obviously not karmically healthy to start labeling people "nerd", "dork",  and "geek" and then writing them off as such.  So, you might ask, why do I bring it up?

Because you, like me, are almost certainly a nerd, a geek, and a dork.  And, as you might have inferred from my definitions above, nerds are better than geeks, and dorks are worse than both.

First, consider your inner nerd.  It's good to be intellectually curious, to stretch your cognitive abilities in new and interesting ways, to learn things about how systems work.  Physical systems, social systems, technological systems: it's always good to know more.  It's even good to be curious to the point of awkwardness, especially if you're a kid who is concerned about awkwardness; don't worry about it, it'll make you more interesting later.  It's good to foster any habits which are a little nerdy.

Second, your inner geek.  It's okay to enjoy things, even to obsess about them a little bit, but I think that our culture is really starting to overdo this.  Geeks are presented in popular media as equally, almost infinitely, obsessed with Star Wars, calculus, Star Trek, computer security, and terrible food (cheese whiz, sugary soda brands, etc).  No real people actually have time for all this stuff.  At some point, you have to choose whether you're going to memorize Maxwell's or Kosinski's equations.

One way that you can keep your inner geek in check is to always ask yourself the question: am I watching this movie / playing this game / reading this book because I actually enjoy it and I think it's worthwhile, or am I just trying to make myself conform to some image of myself as someone who knows absolutely everything about this one little cultural niche?

There are people who will treat being a fan of something that someone else created as morally equivalent (or, in a sense, even better than) creating something yourself, and those people are not doing you any favors.  Do not pay attention to them.

Of course, there's some overlap.  People who like playing with systems in real life enjoy the fluffier, more lightweight intellectual challenges of playing with the rules of fictional universes, especially the ones from speculative fiction.  When I was a kid, I went to a couple of Star Trek conventions and let me tell you, there were some legit nerds there; astrophysicists, rocket scientists, and experimental chemists, all excitedly talking about how they were inspired to pursue their careers by fiction of various kinds.

So go ahead, take a break, and geek out. Just don't tell yourself that it's anything other than for fun.

Finally, your inner dork.

As you're enthusiastically cultivating your nerdiness and carefully managing your geekiness, you will be accumulating a little bit of dorkiness as you go: at some point you have to make decisions about whether to do some minor social obligation in order to spend some time on learning a new thing (or re-watching your favorite movie).  You have to decide whether to restrain yourself so you can listen to your friend talk about a rough day at their job or to start spouting facts about the progress of the repairs on the large hadron collider.

Sometimes, on balance, it's acceptable to be a little bit inconsiderate in the pursuit of something more important.  People worth being friends with will see that and understand.  Heck, practically every movie plot these days puts at least one awkward and abrasive nerd in a sympathetic and even heroic position.  But be careful: once you decide that social graces are your lowest priority, it's a hop skip and a jump from being a lovable but absent-minded genius to being a blathering blowhard who just will not shut up about some tedious Riemannian manifold crap that nobody cares about even we just told them that somebody died.

The goal of the nerd or the geek, after all, is not to be awkward; it's easy to forget sometimes that that is an unintentional and unpleasant side effect of the good parts of those attributes.  Being a dork is just bad.  After all, if you're so smart, why aren't you nice?