someone recently said (sorry, I have been skimming news lately) that he
  had a problem starting with Lisp because everything was in uppercase --
  small things like that can effectively block one's entry into new areas.
  back when I was fairly new to Lisp (eons and eons ago, of course), I came
  across CLISP and its unf<beep>ingbelievably braindamaged pretty printer.
  it was immediately obvious that this had been implemented in a vacuum,
  free from influence from all knowledgable programmers on the planet and
  beyond, and it still sucked.  to see code printed like this was such a
  horrible experience I immediately seized upon the source code to try to
  find out how to turn this gut-wrenching abomination off.  but what did I
  find?  the entire source code was formatted like this!  aaaaauuugh!  and
  everything in German, to boot.  the abyss was staring back at me.  <fade>

  CLISP has since improved.  no animals have been hurt in its production.