5 ms·

I don't know why but interest of computer community shifted from uppercase letters to lowercase letters over the course of time.

hisham_hm 6y ago
Because Unix won. Other contemporary OSes, like IBM's VM on mainframes, DEC's VMS, Digital Research CP/M and even Microsoft's MS-DOS and so on all favored uppercase.
- mark-r 6y ago
  Many of those older systems relied on peripherals that only did upper case, such as Teletypes.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Some getty implementations support uppercase-only terminals - the special case-folding mode is enabled automatically by typing an all-uppercase username at login.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    Wonder if it goes even further back to using morse code. As there was no 'case' in that just letters and numbers. Think the custom was to use upper case there. An interesting project to look into someday I guess.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      In the history of typography, capital letters came first, and it still remains standard in a number of contexts to use all capitals, for instance, almost all text you see carved in stone is all capitals, and most newspaper headlines are in all capitals. For some words -- for instance, proper nouns/names -- all lowercase is literally wrong. So to almost anyone, seeing a long block of text in all uppercase may look stodgy or ugly or formal, but all lowercase looks wrong or provocatively artsy, so if you have to choose one or the other, all capitals is kind of a no-brainer.
      - ddingus 6y ago
        I used a similar point as an argument in primary school. They dinged me for sloppy cursive writing so I ended it right there. All upper case, caps were just bigger than the others. Stayed with that until I left High School. Was making some point or other, or was just a PITA.
        megameter 6y ago
        I think a lot of students who grew up with ballpoints reached a similar conclusion. I knew a few and from time to time have used the strategy when legibility is required. Cursive was developed to work with traditional pens, and it really does not flow well on a ballpoint. But the school systems, of course, never made such a distinction.
        ddingus 6y ago
        Totally. I remember just quitting. 26 alphas + numbers and punctuation, and that's gonna be IT. One counter argument was legal signature requirements. Had a parent from city hall clear the law up for me. Was loaded for bear, and my little school really opposed not writing cursive. I remember a few of us, almost all boys going down the road. Interestingly quite a few girls ended up with a sort of print-script we see in cutsie fonts today. Went totally without comment!
        stan_rogers 6y ago
        "Cursive" means slanted. "Current" means joined-up (from the french "courant", literally "running"). Not all cursives are current - Chancery cursive, for instance - and most recent schoolroom current writing isn't cursive.
        danaris 6y ago
        That may be what it means in a technical sense, but what most of us Americans were taught in elementary school was joined-up writing that was presented to us as "cursive," the only (and obviously much more sophisticated) alternative to "print".
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
For me, it’s mostly because uppercase letters either require toggling capslock or holding shift.
baggy_trough 6y ago
If you look at any normal written text, most of it is lowercase.
- pavlov 6y ago
  I think this is part of the reason why many systems in the past favored uppercase for programming languages: it’s easier to tell apart comments from code at a glance.
  - pklausler 6y ago
    Many early character sets (CDC Display Code, UNIVAC's Fieldata) were only 6 bits wide, so there wasn't room for two cases of the letters until 8-bit EBCDIC and 7-bit ASCII came along.
tyingq 6y ago
Word processing, perhaps? Wordstar/Wordperfect.
pilsetnieks 6y ago
Lowercase is simply easier to read because of more diverse letter and word shapes. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-read-are-small-caps-vs-lower-case https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-rea...
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  I can recall when using Mixed case in your Hollerith Constants was considered a bit flash :-) Hollerith constants where the way you did text to terminal IO in Early Fortran's. For example "Press 1 to exit, 2 to edit settings, 3 to start run?" instead of just "?"
- nomel 6y ago
  I would also say it's easier to read since, for the average 20 word 4.7 char sentence, about 99% of the characters that our eyes see, and we read, are all lowercase. edit: as in, perceiving that 1% case will require more effort.
- csnover 6y ago
  This is not correct. The “word shape model” itself is actually probably wrong[0]. > The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins, 1975). [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-recognition https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-rec...
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    Even if this is true and it's just practice, any new programmer still comes with years of practice in reading mostly lowercased text and very little experience reading all-uppercase text. In a field where everything gets reinvented all the time this should have a big impact.
croes 6y ago
Maybe because some international alphabets have letters that only exist as lower case. For example the german ß didn't have a capital form before 2008.
ISV_Damocles 6y ago
So you don't need to distinguish keywords from variables by case when you have syntax highlighting, and lowercase has been shown to be faster to comprehend than uppercase while driving[0], so switching that metadata signal to a secondary channel (color of the text) seems natural. colorForth[1] was made on a similar premise to exploit that channel, but as a read-write rather than just read channel. [0]: https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=475144 https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=475144 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Well, Unix was typed in on terminals that only had upper-case fonts. So it all looked uppercase. Then when we got terminals that had lowercase fonts too, the Unix source was surprise! all lowercase. Because that's how it was typed in and nobody noticed.
- spicybright 6y ago
  That's hilarious :)

hisham_hm 6y ago

Because Unix won. Other contemporary OSes, like IBM's VM on mainframes, DEC's VMS, Digital Research CP/M and even Microsoft's MS-DOS and so on all favored uppercase.

mark-r 6y ago
Many of those older systems relied on peripherals that only did upper case, such as Teletypes.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Some getty implementations support uppercase-only terminals - the special case-folding mode is enabled automatically by typing an all-uppercase username at login.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Wonder if it goes even further back to using morse code. As there was no 'case' in that just letters and numbers. Think the custom was to use upper case there. An interesting project to look into someday I guess.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    In the history of typography, capital letters came first, and it still remains standard in a number of contexts to use all capitals, for instance, almost all text you see carved in stone is all capitals, and most newspaper headlines are in all capitals. For some words -- for instance, proper nouns/names -- all lowercase is literally wrong. So to almost anyone, seeing a long block of text in all uppercase may look stodgy or ugly or formal, but all lowercase looks wrong or provocatively artsy, so if you have to choose one or the other, all capitals is kind of a no-brainer.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      I used a similar point as an argument in primary school. They dinged me for sloppy cursive writing so I ended it right there. All upper case, caps were just bigger than the others. Stayed with that until I left High School. Was making some point or other, or was just a PITA.
      - megameter 6y ago
        I think a lot of students who grew up with ballpoints reached a similar conclusion. I knew a few and from time to time have used the strategy when legibility is required. Cursive was developed to work with traditional pens, and it really does not flow well on a ballpoint. But the school systems, of course, never made such a distinction.
        ddingus 6y ago
        Totally. I remember just quitting. 26 alphas + numbers and punctuation, and that's gonna be IT. One counter argument was legal signature requirements. Had a parent from city hall clear the law up for me. Was loaded for bear, and my little school really opposed not writing cursive. I remember a few of us, almost all boys going down the road. Interestingly quite a few girls ended up with a sort of print-script we see in cutsie fonts today. Went totally without comment!
        stan_rogers 6y ago
        "Cursive" means slanted. "Current" means joined-up (from the french "courant", literally "running"). Not all cursives are current - Chancery cursive, for instance - and most recent schoolroom current writing isn't cursive.
        danaris 6y ago
        That may be what it means in a technical sense, but what most of us Americans were taught in elementary school was joined-up writing that was presented to us as "cursive," the only (and obviously much more sophisticated) alternative to "print".

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago

For me, it’s mostly because uppercase letters either require toggling capslock or holding shift.

baggy_trough 6y ago

If you look at any normal written text, most of it is lowercase.

pavlov 6y ago
I think this is part of the reason why many systems in the past favored uppercase for programming languages: it’s easier to tell apart comments from code at a glance.
- pklausler 6y ago
  Many early character sets (CDC Display Code, UNIVAC's Fieldata) were only 6 bits wide, so there wasn't room for two cases of the letters until 8-bit EBCDIC and 7-bit ASCII came along.

tyingq 6y ago

Word processing, perhaps? Wordstar/Wordperfect.

pilsetnieks 6y ago

Lowercase is simply easier to read because of more diverse letter and word shapes. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-read-are-small-caps-vs-lower-case https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/72622/how-easy-to-rea...

C1sc0cat 6y ago
I can recall when using Mixed case in your Hollerith Constants was considered a bit flash :-) Hollerith constants where the way you did text to terminal IO in Early Fortran's. For example "Press 1 to exit, 2 to edit settings, 3 to start run?" instead of just "?"
nomel 6y ago
I would also say it's easier to read since, for the average 20 word 4.7 char sentence, about 99% of the characters that our eyes see, and we read, are all lowercase. edit: as in, perceiving that 1% case will require more effort.
csnover 6y ago
This is not correct. The “word shape model” itself is actually probably wrong[0]. > The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. Even text oriented as if you were seeing it in a mirror will quickly increase in reading speed with practice (Kolers & Perkins, 1975). [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-recognition https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/develop/word-rec...
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Even if this is true and it's just practice, any new programmer still comes with years of practice in reading mostly lowercased text and very little experience reading all-uppercase text. In a field where everything gets reinvented all the time this should have a big impact.

croes 6y ago

Maybe because some international alphabets have letters that only exist as lower case. For example the german ß didn't have a capital form before 2008.

ISV_Damocles 6y ago

So you don't need to distinguish keywords from variables by case when you have syntax highlighting, and lowercase has been shown to be faster to comprehend than uppercase while driving[0], so switching that metadata signal to a secondary channel (color of the text) seems natural. colorForth[1] was made on a similar premise to exploit that channel, but as a read-write rather than just read channel. [0]: https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=475144 https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=475144 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Well, Unix was typed in on terminals that only had upper-case fonts. So it all looked uppercase. Then when we got terminals that had lowercase fonts too, the Unix source was surprise! all lowercase. Because that's how it was typed in and nobody noticed.

spicybright 6y ago
That's hilarious :)