More case stuff: speed and accuracy

[Kent M. Pitman <KMP at MIT-MC>]

I would also be interested in knowing how many people advocating function
names like LoadByte over load-byte, etc. are touch typists and what their
typing speed is. I type I think reasonably fast (upwards of 50 words a minute)
and I note that it blocks my typing speed tremendously to have to shift.
The "-" key can be hit in sequence with other keys because it's only one thing
to have to toss in, but having to shift involves coordinating two fingers to
do something at exactly the same time and then making sure I get my finger off
the shift key in time for the following character. I would anticipate that
in a system that made case matter and that had mixed case variable names,
I'd have to type considerably slower. I would consider this a reasonably
expensive price to pay since I code very fast and if I know roughly what I
want to write, my coding speed may well be bounded by my typing speed. Slower
typists or fast typists who don't code very fast may not be bothered a whole
lot may not be bothered so much by this ... This is particularly critical in
interactive debugging on systems without a toplevel text editor built into
the lisp reader where I may have just held the shift key too long and have
to rub way back just to change the shift of a character that I typed wrong
without noticing ... Yes, I know, I could have dropped a dash or typed a wrong
key, but I claim that it's easier to make a case mistake than to hit a wrong
letter in a lot of cases just because the shift key involves synchronizing
two fingers and the other types of processes that go on in typing are problems
of sequential .. Certainly the frustration level of having typed
(Setq foo 3) and then finding that you'd left the shift on too long for the
"S" is worse than the frustration level of having doing (Aetq foo 3). The
former does not "feel" to me like it has as much right to be an error. The
latter is much easier to tolerate an error message about...