> it would be easier if the languages all used a common naming convention for things like .upper() etc.
Well, it would definitely be easier if all the languages used the same conventions. The problem here, I think, is that all the possible conventions are arbitrary and objectively as good as any other, so there are many of them and settling on a single one across languages is not going to happen.
It's much more important to choose one convention for a language and to follow it everywhere - this improves guessability of identifiers in that language. The convention chosen may be familiar to you or not, but that doesn't mean the more familiar one is any better. So, I think, it's more important for a language to follow a single convention consistently, while choosing which convention to follow is less important.
That being said, I agree that it would be easier to learn new languages if they all followed a single standard for naming things, I just don't think it's going to happen.
> If I can make a reasonably intelligent guess within 2 or 3 tries, then it bodes well for me. Otherwise it is a productivity hit.
Agreed, but note that the 2-3 tries are informed by your experiences to date - someone with a different history of programming languages could find your guesses weird and would have completely different ones themselves.
Another thing, I agree on the productivity hit in principle, just want to note that there are ways of mitigating it. I use many languages regularly (I'm a hobbyist-polyglot, I learned at least 30-40 languages to varying degrees) and I think that a good editor integration (most notably "semantic auto-complete" and "inline docs") can make up for a lot of cases like the `upcase`. For example, if I write this (`|` is cursor position):
a = "asd"
a.up|
and hit <tab>, I get a popup with the suggestion of a correct name (`upper`) along with a bit of documentation. The level of support for this obviously varies a lot across languages, but where it's available I find it mostly fixes the problem of having to hit the docs too often.
> NB: I didn't downvote you
It's impossible to downvote immediate child posts, no matter the karma level, so it obviously couldn't be you :)
