There's no reason that types and variables need to live in the same namespace. The language can know what it's expecting at a certain point. Putting them in different namespaces, like Lisp does, lets you re-use the same name for types and variables even with matching case, and is more waterproof with regards to clashes than a case convention.
> There simply isn't any good reason not to always use the same case for any variable throughout a project.
I agree, but I also feel that there isn't any good reason to have multiple distinct objects in the same namespace whose names differ only by case. It just seems like a recipe for confusion.
When I'm quickly iterating on something, it's nice being able to be lazy and inconsistent with capitalisation. Standardising that in a codebase is important, but it's more of a job for a linter, I think.
And as soon as we go to more dynamic languages, where types can also be variables, it all breaks down.
The Pascal way would be to use the "T" convention for the name of the type. So "thing : TThing".
Maybe people who somehow don't differentiate between 'T' and 't', and are not visually remembering persons, don't have this problem. But for me, and for computers, they are different characters.
What really irks me is that in case-insensitive languages, codebases naturally start to use all kinds of variations of casing, to refer to the same variable. It really trips me up when reading code. It's also difficult when writing code since I tend to remember variable names in a very visual way. (Same reason why I dislike the case-insensitive Windows filesystems).
There simply isn't any good reason not to always use the same case for any variable throughout a project.
Beyond that it's also aesthetically not pleasing, from an engineering viewpoint. Case-insensitive comparison is much more complicated than simply comparing strings as arrays of bytes.
Historically, I think the reason why case-insensitive languages exist is simply that at the time they were invented (at least in the case of Pascal), many systems couldn't input lowercase characters.