It’s a question many people ask. It’s a question many people want an answer to. But if you try to find an answer to the question “What should I use in my programming?” then you’re bound to find conflicting answers from various corners of the software sphere.

It turns out, that there isn’t any one right answer. Usually, you should do what works for you. More often than not, when you join an agency, you’ll be asked to conform to the current pattern set by the existing team, which itself will likely have been introduced by the first developer in a much younger agency many moons ago.

So, I can’t tell you what to do. But I can tell you what I do and why, and maybe it’ll help you? Who knows. So, here goes…

PHP

You name it, I’ve seen it. People use everything in PHP. Underscores, camel-case, underscores, uppercase, hy… no. Not hyphens. I’ve never seen hyphens.

Why?

Because – Hyphens aren’t allowed in variable names. And, assuming you’re a php developer you should know why. $variable-name is interpreted by PHP as $variable minus name. And what’s in a name? Well, without a $, PHP will assume it’s a pre-defined constant. So, first off, don’t use hyphens.

So, what do I use? I used camelCase. For everything. When it comes to high-level languages, most people use camel-case or underscores. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with underscores – I just happen to find it faster to hold shift and press a key, rather than hold shift to make an underscore, then type the next letter. So my variables look $likeThis. Constants though, should always be capitalised – this is actually pretty standard across most industries. That’s because, in languages that don’t use prefixes, it makes it much clearer. $variable and CONSTANT. Easy to see isn’t it?

Training languages, such as BASIC encourage you to capitalise keywords: INPUT, PRINT, DIM etc. But these days, we have colour-coded editors and it’s very standard to make everything lower-case except constants. Get it?

MySQL

Ah. Well, that’s just blown myself out of the water. When you type a MySQL statement, you DO type the keywords in capitals. That’s because it makes it VERY CLEAR to see which statements are DOOERS and which are ACTORS. SELECT name FROM users WHERE password = ‘hackme’.

By the way – never store plain text passwords. Ever. If you’re ever unlucky enough to be my subordinate and I catch you doing it I WILL FIRE YOU. Storing plain text passwords are bad for many, many reasons.

1. People generally use one password for everything, regardless of how you educate them. If this password ever gets revealed to the world from your site, you’ve just screwed them over in multiple ways and they will sue you for every penny you, your family and your whole ancestry has ever earned.
2. Regardless of how secure your website is, you can never be sure that your developers have remembered to secure every entry point. One hole, and a hacker can dump your whole database, and as bad as that is for your company, it’s worse for your customers. And then worse for you, when they all sue you.
3. My website is safe, I’ve secured all the entry points. Or have I? What about the server itself? All the hundreds of processes and protocols it runs? Can I guarantee the work of the developers of all of those too? No. Never assume you’re safe for a second. Always keep your (to use a terrible cliché) ‘eye on the ball’.
4. Ok, So I’m a GOD and everything is so secure I’ll never be hacked. But, it turns out, one of my employees is dodgy, and sold the unencrypted password database to someone for £1,000. They convinced them, it was just a list of passwords and emails for our site which is just a newsletter signup – what could they even do with that info? Easy money! Except they just successfully logged into a range of websites across 100,000 customers and ‘hacked’ several million pounds of wealth for themselves. Well done.

So remember: Watch your code, watch your servers, watch your employees. And if the site is hosted by another company – their employees might not be all on the level too. More security is better. The only difference you’ll have to make by keeping only encrypted passwords is to change your forgotten password system – send people a link with a unique hash ID to change their password, rather than re-sending them their password, which you can’t. Simple. But I digress…

JavaScript

Much like PHP, I like to use camelCase for JavaScript. Simple eh?

HTML and CSS

Oh, where to start. This is often the area I take most issue with other developers. As it turns out, a lot of HTML developers use hyphens in their class and id names. But I don’t – I use underscores.

Why?

Well, remember, hyphens aren’t valid variable names. And I like to pretend that classes and ids are variables. Especially when you have to manipulate these things with JavaScript – hyphens just seem to fail a little. I often relate using it to starting a class or id name with a number. I’ve seen it done by several people. What’s the harm in using or starting a class name with a number? It’s easy to use JavaScript to do cool things like that! Except – you just failed. Numbers aren’t valid variable names. var 6 = 9 just wouldn’t make sense to anyone. If I said to you: ‘6!’. Would you think: ‘He means 6′ or ‘He means the contents of 6, which is 9′? But ids and classes aren’t variables, so why can’t I use numbers at the beginning of them? Well, to me it seems obvious – the people who developed it wanted to be consistent. So, stay consistent. Don’t use numbers at the beginning. And, I can’t stop you using hyphens, but I’ll respect you more if you use underscores.

Oh, and regardless of what you use, I won’t respect you at all if your sites don’t validate. There’s no excuse AT ALL to produce a website which doesn’t validate. Who cares? you ask. I care. And you’ll care when you do something dodgy that messes up in the next version of IE and you have 100 clients within their guarantee demanding a free fix!

Oh, and don’t go around using camel-case in your ids and classes. Because I said so. Generally, you’ll find all good sources of web tutorials will tell you to use lower-case for everything. It’s not good to mix case in HTML / CSS, because of the way some browsers can treat things (and why cause more preventable problems for yourself than you have to?) I know a lot of ASP developers do it. But, just don’t. The web elite web community is quite anal, and they won’t like you for it. And will tell you how ASP is a derivative of Visual Basic which is a derivative of BASIC which is a BABY language. And, I’ll join them in mocking you.

I think that’s everything. Did I miss something? Did I annoy you? Leave a comment!