Re: Document that symbol prefix "my-" (or other) should be left for users

[Chad Brown <yandros@gmail.com>]

> On 15 Dec 2015, at 17:26, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> So can you give a reason why Emacs-Lisp coding conventions
> should reserve such a prefix (or any other) for users?
> Haven't heard any reason, so far.

I have seen people run into conflicts several times (over a long
time frame). At MIT, many students started out with simple
lisp functions added to a mostly-plain emacs. Eventually, they’d
add packages, and occasionally hit conflicts. A convention of
user/function-name would have avoided all of those.

This was in the time before package.el became widespread, so I
believe that packages are added to emacs far more often now than
they were then. Of course, back then, MIT’s intro CS class was
based on Scheme, so probably there are fewer people writing
personal lisp into nearly-empty .emacs files these days.

So: if you want to know if it has ever happened: absolutely. I don’t
know if this sort of thing comes up much anymore; MIT students’
experience doesn’t involve emacs nearly as much these days as it did
back then.

Hope that helps,
~Chad