The "ascending" tip is from experience. It's really easier than moving operators around in your head.
The human mind is good at overloading operators. Especially since the infix < never appears after an open paren, it takes little time to teach yourself to read it as "ascending". It even looks small on the left and big on the right, visualizing an ascending list. Once you learn it that way, shortcuts like (<= 1 n 10) to see if a number is between one and ten come naturally.
True that infix < doesn't appear right after parens, but in the minds of most people, there isn't really a notion of "infix" as an entity unto itself. The alligator just eats the bigger fish.
Really, the problem is that a small amount of whitespace can change the meaning of the code.
(< 1 2) => #t
(<1 2) => #f
...for a convenience function <1 that semantically means "is less than 1". Maybe you wouldn't define such a function, but having to think about it at all or having to mentally redefine < somewhat validates the idea that the syntax here is a stumbling point.
The "ascending" tip is from experience. It's really easier than moving operators around in your head.
The human mind is good at overloading operators. Especially since the infix < never appears after an open paren, it takes little time to teach yourself to read it as "ascending". It even looks small on the left and big on the right, visualizing an ascending list. Once you learn it that way, shortcuts like (<= 1 n 10) to see if a number is between one and ten come naturally.