In Elisp, there's no other way, because you cannot create private symbols, everything is public and global. What's even worse is that in the case of name clash,

In Elisp, there's no other way, because you cannot create private symbols, everything is public and global. What's even worse is that in the case of name clash, the named entity (variable, function, macro) gets silently replaced with the new definition. So, without a convention of, roughly: package-name--private-function package-name-public-function package-name-class-name-_field_name You're playing with fire. But that's an extreme edge case. For other cases, I agree completely. Indeed, the only meaningful consideration when talking about readability is the mechanics of eye movement. You can get used to reading almost anything, but you can't change how your eye works. Line length limits are important also because of this, not only because of better diffs. I also dislike spamming newlines everywhere, as if the line length limit was 20 chars. The newline suggests, to me at least, that something was done and we're moving on. It's a weak signal, but convenient. Now, when you split every single object.call1().call2().callN() into multiple lines, it's actually harder to see the whole thing (you can't see much more than a few lines at the same time) and it makes that signal disappear in the noise. In any case - all talk about "readability" should start, and more importantly stop, at physical and mechanical limitations of human vision. Everything else is just familiarity with a particular notation or style.