I love this, but at the risk of farting in church, when I see car and cdr (instead of the more sane first and rest), I feel as if millions of man hours suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
The main alternatives, first and rest, don't work as well in my head.
I mean, car and cdr give you the structure:
struct List {
Atom car,
struct List* cdr
}
Which also explains why an empty list, '(), is nil.
rest sort of implies the next memory section of the list will always be a list. But that's just not the case with a cons cell.
It is a little odd compared to many modern languages, that a data structure is so exposed to the programmer - but it needs to be. Almost everything you do is impacted by that structure, (well, compiler optimisations aside).
It did catch me by surprise when I first came to the LISPy side of things, but once I understood the basic idea of the structure... There wasn't anything left to understand. It explains half the syntax by itself. Why functions are always the first item in a list, for example. car is a cheaper lookup than cdr.
If instead, we weren't dealing with linked lists, but everything was a vector, with a known size, I could see first and rest as making more sense.
Never a noob, were you? Never considered that the source code primacy to convey the programmer's intent and that a modified lump of sand can do something with it is a nice side effect?
I was certainly a new programmer once. I don't remember this one catching me offguard anymore than most other things. Lambda, in particular, was much more to wrap my head around. Or defun. Even define is somewhat awkward.
So, sure, first is more descriptive than car. However, first also should have applied to an array. And it does, just not in the same way. Which is itself confusing.
