I don't use staticaly typed languages (nowadays I'm trying Dart though, for Flutter). My main languages are Elisp, Perl, Python and Ruby. And some Posix shell

I don't use staticaly typed languages (nowadays I'm trying Dart though, for Flutter). My main languages are Elisp, Perl, Python and Ruby. And some Posix shell. I'm a fan of Lisp. WRT keyword, I think that's a bug, not a nuance. This is the doc: > Returns a Keyword with the given namespace and name. Do not use : in the keyword strings, it will be added automatically. Nowhere does it say it returns sth. else than a keyword. Following is the doc for "intern" from Emacs Lisp, which does a similar job and signals "wrong-type-argument" with improper input: --- intern is a built-in function in ‘C source code’. (intern STRING &optional OBARRAY) Return the canonical symbol whose name is STRING. If there is none, one is created by this function and returned. A second optional argument specifies the obarray to use; it defaults to the value of ‘obarray’. --- So it does what it says or fails otherwise. This sort of error handling and streamlined, nice debugging is the best part of interactive programming; otherwise it's just Java with a lot of parentheses. Handling non-standard arguments in intuitive ways can be useful indeed, but not so if they are accidental, possibly working due only to implementation details, and undocumented.