Why your computer code and chemical formulas share a secret, hump-backed writing style
In short: Camel case, the practice of joining words without spaces by using internal capital letters, is more than a modern coding quirk. From 19th-century chemistry to the constraints of early Xerox hardware, this visual shorthand has evolved into a global standard for making complex information readable in a crowded digital world.
The origins of medial capitalization are surprisingly practical. While often associated with modern software, the first systematic use appeared in 1813 when Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius introduced a notation for chemical elements. By using one or two letters with an initial capital, he allowed formulas like NaCl to be written and parsed without ambiguity, replacing a chaotic array of competing conventions.
In the computing era, the style emerged as a necessity. Early programming languages like FORTRAN and ALGOL used hyphens as subtraction operators, making them unsuitable for multi-word variable names. When ASCII character sets became widespread in the late 1960s, the underscore became a popular separator. However, at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, the hardware constraints of the Xerox Alto—which lacked an underscore key—forced developers to adopt camel case for the Mesa language. This style was further popularized by the Smalltalk language in the early 1980s.
Today, the convention is defined by its readability. Pascal case, or upper camel case, capitalizes every word, while lower camel case starts with a lowercase letter. Beyond programming, the style appears in corporate branding, such as FedEx or iPhone, and even in natural languages like Irish, where it handles inflectional prefixes. While critics argue that these compound words can impair readability, the style remains a vital tool for managing multi-word identifiers where spaces are forbidden, proving that even the most technical writing formats are born from the limitations of the tools we use.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Camel case
- Also: Wikidata — camel case · CC0
- Also: Wikidata — camel-case · CC0
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