User('ben') -- what does that even mean? Find 'ben' in a database? Create 'ben'? Get the 'ben' singleton? Maybe I've spent too much time in the land of lisp, but I'd like the code I read to actually tell me what it's trying to do.
I'm a fan of case insensitivity for pedagogic and typographical reasons. If you watch the H-P SICP videos, you'll see Sussman and Abelson writing code in upper case, lower case, whatever case. `Lambda' and `cond' and `if' are words, not hieroglyphs, and I want to be able to write them, and write about them, without having to do typographically stupid things like starting sentences with lowercase letters.
That said, there are times when you may want case sensitivity, but I'd rather create a "I need case sensitive tokens" kludge than deal all case sensitive tokens, all the time.
I'd take this a step further and say that syntactically-significant case, a la Haskell, is a good idea. You already use case to disambiguate to human readers, so why should the compiler be oblivious to the distinction?
I'm a fan of case insensitivity for pedagogic and typographical reasons. If you watch the H-P SICP videos, you'll see Sussman and Abelson writing code in upper case, lower case, whatever case. `Lambda' and `cond' and `if' are words, not hieroglyphs, and I want to be able to write them, and write about them, without having to do typographically stupid things like starting sentences with lowercase letters.
That said, there are times when you may want case sensitivity, but I'd rather create a "I need case sensitive tokens" kludge than deal all case sensitive tokens, all the time.