I was doing edit reviews on Stack Overflow and found out that people keeps correcting the word "boolean", replacing it with "Boolean" when it appears in text (but not in source code, of course). And then I found out that the spelling checker in my browser agrees with them.
Is there any rationale behind this? It seems grammatically incorrect.
I think the word boolean is used in two different ways, either among programmers as a simple noun, "return a boolean", or as part of a mathematical term, "boolean logic", "boolean algebra". None of these cases seem to motivate a capital letter. You don't write "return a Float", "Fuzzy logic" or "Linear algebra" (unless of course it is at the beginning of a sentence).
I suppose that the capital letter in "Boolean" somehow refers to the name George Boole. But then that doesn't make sense either. I found this link which gives some excellent examples of similar cases, where some term is named after a person, but no capital letter is used.
Any consensus? What is correct? What should we use?