Underscores are stupid

  All you have give up for this is tightly-packed arithmetic statements, like this:

    5*5-3

  Instead, you have to give your tokens some breathing room:

    5 * 5 - 3

I don't know, that seems pretty stupid too.

One of the most efficient everyday optimizations I've made in the past few years was to adopt the lisp-style naming convention for my local file system hierarchy. Removing all capitalization and special characters (other than the dash) makes navigating via CLI much easier. And having a predictable naming scheme means I rely on tab completion slightly less too, as I have more predictive capability regarding how I might have named things in the past. More generally, treating my home folder as, essentially, an exposed API for which I'm the primary consumer has paid dividends.

This misses one point when comparing Lisp to languages like Ruby. Lisp does not have infix notation. Therefore, you never have to worry that "foo-bar" (the symbol) could ever be confused with "foo - bar” the operation subtracting bar from foo. That’s because in Lisp, foo-bar is written "(- foo bar).”

Since a Lisp programmer spends all his time writing "(- foo bar),” when he sees “foo-bar,” his brain easily parses it as a symbol, and he never needs to wonder whether it should actually have been “foo - bar” with spaces to separate the infix operator from the symbols representing variables.

and gets even worse if you bring variables into the game.

a = 5

b = 3

everybody from nearly every programming language would expect that after

c = a-b

you will find c to be 2 not nil (or throwing an exception or whatever)

Writing almost exclusively in a underscore-encouraging language like Python has numbed me to these issues.