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Don’t get a hump about CamelCase
We love doing research. Even better, we love it when you do it for us. As Brian Rossiter at Process Systems & Services, among many others, points out: ‘The term for composite words including capitalisation is UpperCamelCase or lowerCamelCase, depending on whether or not the first letter is capitalised.’
You see, the big letters are like a camel hump. As the Wikipedia article you all pointed us to reveals, it is also known less elegantly as BiCapitalisation, camelBack, InterCaps, MixedCase or PolyCaps.
‘CamelCase has been sporadically used since ancient times, such as in Scottish names like MacLean,’ the article continues. ‘Then there is CinemaScope in the 1950s and MasterCard in the 1970s, among many others. But it really hit the big time thanks to IT people – and ‘CamelCase’ is first recorded in 1995.
‘If I remember correctly, was coined by Microsoft,’ says John Garvani, who we do not think is correct – if Microsoft had got its way, we might all have names eight letters long, and second names of three letters.
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