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A blog by Andrew Thorp

Golang Naming Conventions

I've been working with Golang off and on since college. When I first

encountered the language I knew Java and C, and I was thrilled to be working

with a language that felt modern yet familiar. The language's opinions were

sensible but things like type-inference, simple concurrency, and duck-typing

were refreshing. I no longer feel this way

Now, I feel like every time I encounter an opinionated decision in Golang's

design or prescriptive style I disagree with it. Not just "I don't like this"

so much as "I don't understand how this could be a positive choice". The

perfect example of this is actually a part of the Go Official Style™ [1]:

Initialisms are, by standard, consistently cased. So if you have a VOIP ID or

Target Group ARN they want you to write it VOIPID and TargetGroupARN instead of

VoipID TargetGroupArn. This degrades the readability of the variables and the

ability to break the var into words. When you camel case initialisms you are

able to intuitively break up VoipId into VOIP and ID. This is more difficult

with VOIPID or voipid. God forbid you need to do so programmatically.

Without a dictionary of initialisms most programs would break the first example

into the words "V", "O", "I", "P", "I", and "D". Us humans have a dictionary

of initialisms in our brain, so all we need to do is try and figure out where

to place the delimeter.

Of course Golang has a solution for this: mix and match! Use lowercase for one

word and UPPERCASE for the next. Easy! voipID and VOIPid (in the case of a

public field) are easy and only come at the cost of inconsistent casing.

Of course this breaks down if you have three in a row.

VoipXmlId

VOIPXMLID

VOIPxmlID

voipXMLid

Someone please tell me what could possibly be a defense for this. I can't

fathom what we gain from this casing convention.

[1] Golang official initialisms convention

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