Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[Fredrik Lundh]

Marko Samastur <markos at elite.org> wrote:
> > some relevant quotes:
> >
> >     "Python is case sensitive. While we, as programmers, were com-
> >     fortable with this language feature, our user community suffered
> >     much confusion over it. At least 85% of users who were observed
> >     using the Alice tutorial made a case error at some point during the
> >     experience. While explaining the case rule was simple enough
> >     ("upper and lower case mean different things to Alice"), this was
> >     not sufficient to instill a "case aware" sense in our users.  Of the
> >     users who had problems with case, most continued to type case-
> >     incorrect tokens in their programs for a short period. Coming to
>                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Part of every learning is making mistakes. Nobody picked up a bicycle
> and knew how to ride it immediately.

Sure, that's what the boo.com folks used to tell their investors ;-)

The problem with your argument is that the Alice environment is a single
system.  In a case-sensitive environment, people will waste time typing
"case-incorrect tokens into their programs for a short period", for every
new Python library.

Maybe non-geek programmers have better things to do with their time?

</F>

  "What stupidity. We don't need any more case-sensitive computers."
  -- Jakob Nielsen