[Nipy-devel] How to capitalize NIPY?

[Jarrod Millman]

!!WARNING!!
The following is pedantic.  Sorry.
!!ENDWARNING!!

Hey,

Given the amount of time I spend writing about NIPY (mostly grants), I
can't help but think about how we should capitalize the letters of the
acronym.  I tend to write NIPY with all capital letters, but I think
almost everyone else writes NiPy using camelcase capitalization.  I
will try and make my case and if you aren't convinced, I will start
using NiPy as well.

1. Most wikis recognize NiPy as a wiki word.  This leads to a
proliferation of webpages (or at least potential pages that someone
may feel compelled to populate).  On our trac site we have:
http://projects.scipy.org/neuroimaging/ni/wiki
http://projects.scipy.org/neuroimaging/ni/wiki/AboutNiPy
http://projects.scipy.org/neuroimaging/ni/wiki/NiPy
All 3 pages could potentially contain the same content.  We can get
rid of the AboutNiPy page, which leaves us with 2 pages.  We will have
at least 2 such pages on the user's site when we switch to moinmoin.
Then if anyone mentions NiPy in a ticket on NumPy or SciPy, we will
have wikiwords on both those sites.  Moreover, any lab or imaging
center that has a wiki will potentially create additional wikiwords.
Either we will get a bunch of different pages saying what NiPy is or
we get a bunch of ugly broken links.  I know we could ask everyone to
write !NiPy so as to avoid it being rendered as a wiki word; but it is
not reasonable to expect everyone who writes wiki content to always
remember to prepend the '!'.

2. Style guides are, as far as I can tell, agree that we should either
capitalize all letters or only the 1st letter of acronyms.  US guides
tend toward capitalizing all the letters; while, British guides
recommend to only capitalize the first letter if you pronounce the
word rather than saying each letter.  So if we follow the conventions
dictated by the style guides we should write NIPY or Nipy.  I know
that NumPy, SciPy, fMRI are all notable counter-examples.  Personally,
I prefer using FMRI to fMRI.

3. Most style guides recommend against CamelCase; although advertisers
and programmers are making the practice more fashionable.  CamelCase
is usually used when the acronym is a contraction (e.g., the journal
NeuroImage).  In the case of SciPy and NumPy, the 'Sci' and 'Num' are
obvious contractions of science and numeric.  In the case of NiPy,
'Ni' isn't a cotraction of anything and doesn't seem particularly
evocative of anything.  I am sure some of you may appreciate the nod
to the Knights of Ni; but I would prefer not to emphasize the
reference.

4.  Personally, I think that NIPY just looks better than NiPy.  For
instance, the banners on both the user's and developer's sites use
NIPY and I think they look reasonably nice.

Please let me know if i should switch to using NiPy for consistency or
if you would prefer to use NIPY.  I think that the first point above
is the most compelling; but I think that rather practical point is
nicely reinforced by the fact that it is also more standard practice
to write NIPY.

Thanks for reading this far and I promise to not bring up what we call
the project of how we spell or capitalize it again.

-- 
Jarrod Millman
Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs
10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
phone: 510.643.4014
http://cirl.berkeley.edu/