> If we decide the answer is yes (as advised by the coding conventions) we
> could start by simply aliasing the existing API that does not follow this
> convention. That'd mean `copy-alist` would be aliased as `alist-copy`, do
> you think people would be strongly against this?

I think there is no need to rigidly put the crucial word 'alist'
at the start of the name. Just having 'alist' in the function name
makes it easy enough to find that function.

This prevents me from searching for `^alist` and have the curated list of all alist related functions.

With alist, searching for `.*alist.*` is not so bad, but with `file-name` the problem shows more clearly: you have a lot of results that you'd like to ignore (functions from tramp, etc).