[mjn]

I find that mildly annoying as well, though since I came to Lisp after Unix/C, it didn't make a huge impression on me. It's possibly more grating in CL just because it doesn't fit the rest of the aesthetic: in user-written code it's idiomatic to write functions with names like sort-database, not like srtdb. While with Unix + C you don't really expect utilities or functions to have anything but cryptic names. I think some of it may relate to Lisp coalescing over many years: some of those old cryptically named functions were named in the 1950s or 1960s, when every language of the time, from ALGOL to FORTRAN to LISP (not to mention assemblers), used identifiers like that— in all caps, of course.