> Rich Hickey did not invent 'first' and 'rest'.

Rather than the names 'car' and 'cdr', the "muck" that Rich Hickey jettisoned here was conses as a core language feature. Since Lisp already used first and rest for operating on lists, Clojure borrowed those names, and since Clojure doesn't have conses (in the Lisp sense of the term; Clojure has a cons function, but it just adds elements to sequences rather than constructing pairs), it didn't have any need for car and cdr, which operate on conses.

It reminds me of a section from Kent Pitman's article 'More Than Words, or: Lambda, the Ultimate Political Party':

> Some years ago, when I was first becoming involved with language standards, I did a personal study of languages in the Lisp family to determine whether there was a common core of operators that were present throughout the family with the same name and semantics.

Then after going through several basic operators which differ in behaviour or name across dialects, he concludes:

> I did find that CONS was present in every Lisp I looked at with pretty much the same meaning, but that seemed to be an isolated case

No one claimed Hickey invented first and rest, or even implied it. The point is not that first and rest didn't exist, but that car and cdr DID. Clojure deliberately left them out, as a design choice. For good or ill, that's the point.

I think that saying "This is why Clojure has first instead of car and rest instead of cdr" is a very odd way of saying "this is why Clojure doesn't have car and cdr" if you don't mean to imply that it added first and rest.

I also think the originally linked article was rather poorly written and seemed to put all of the focus on "car and cdr sure are weird names" without examining that they are operations on cons cells, which Clojure doesn't have. Clojure leaving out the names car and cdr doesn't really have anything to do with those names; it left out the data structure they operate on. A language without numbers proably wouldn't have a sqrt function either, but that has little to do with the clarity of the name sqrt.

Discussing the differences and tradeoffs between how Lisps and Schemes all represent lists compared to how Clojure does (and the tradeoffs with how Clojure makes up for the other things that conses are used for in Lisp) might have made for a more interesting point, but it would have been a harder one to make than just pointing at two not immediately obvious symbol names (without even mentioning that it did keep the equally archaic and unhelpful name "cons" but changed its behaviour).

Clojure doesn't have the concept of Lisp's linked lists, thus it does not have its operators.

Note that where the link now points to is something different. Originally this was the link: http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Clojure/origin-of-car-and...

> Clojure deliberately left them out, as a design choice.

I don't think they were 'left out'. That's not how Clojure was designed, IIRC. Clojure is not first Lisp minus the arcane names, plus second then the new stuff. It's a new language from start, not Lisp with names left out. Hickey did not start with Lisp and redesigned it. He started with a new language, based on ideas like immutable persistent lazy sequences, host language integration with easy interoperation, some Lisp ideas like s-expressions and macros, ... I don't think he thought, 'I leave CAR and CDR out'. There was no place for them, since he designed the language Clojure around different data structure concepts.

In Common Lisp, ELT is generic over sequences, so it also works on arrays. CL also has a function actually called NTH which is specific to lists; NTH was also in Maclisp, Lisp Machine Lisp, etc with the same meaning (Interlisp had an NTH function but it's what Common Lisp calls NTHCDR (except that Interlisp NTH used 1-based indexing whereas CL NTHCDR uses 0-based)). Emacs Lisp uses the same nth/elt distinction as Common Lisp. Islisp has elt which is generic over sequences, but I believe that it discarded nth.