The ambiguities of certain names in Arc really used to confuse me. acons is the cons predicate and alist the list predicate, but afn isn't the function predicate. Moreover, alist has nothing to do with alists (association lists).
Now that I have better command over the language, these things don't bother me so much. They have their own sense, and I increasingly appreciate how "externally exposed names [are] approximately hamming encoded." [1]
I don't mind short names. Indeed, one of my hopes in learning Arc is to get out from under the sheer bulk of the code I usually have to write to implement my ideas.
