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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Shows you how resilient car and cdr have been against decades of complaining and bikeshedding. That just reaffirms them.

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I would accept that if Lisp were a runaway success, but it's not. It is very nearly a dead language [1]. It is entirely possible that the unwillingness of the Lisp community to give up in this obscure terminology in favor of something more user friendly contributed to its demise.

[1] Look at e.g. https://madnight.github.io/githut/. The most popular Lisp is Clojure, with a whopping 0.33% market share. Scheme and Common Lisp don't even make it to the top 50.

CL was #45 in the car quarter of 2017; by cadr, it slipped into the long(er) tail.

> It is entirely possible that the unwillingness of the Lisp community to give up in this obscure terminology in favor of something more user friendly contributed to its demise.

What more-user-friendly terminology do you suggest?

Did you not read the upstream comments? FST and RST, or LHS and RHS depending on whether the intent is to access the cons as a linked list or a pair.

The D in CDR already corresponds to "dexter-" (right); we just need "L" for "levo-":

CLR: cell levo/left reference.

CDR: cell dexter reference.

Organic chemistry uses these letters and prefixes. E.g. "L-glutamine", "D-glucose" (a.k.a "dextrose").

The H and S (hand side) don't really contribute anything. (Yes, left is side and a hand).

The whole point of this exercise (if it has a point at all) is not to come up with acronyms with justifiable expansions, but to come up with something that is less newbie-bostile. I'm not sure CLR/CDR fits the bill any better than CAR/CDR. Part of the problem with CAR/CDR is that CAR is an English word that means automobile, and people get a little hung up on that when they first see it. Likewise, CLR is usually a shortened form of the word "clear". So I'm not sure that CLR/CDR is any better than CAR/CDR. One of the advantages of LHS/RHS and FST/RST is that none of those trigrams have any semantic baggage associated with them other than their intended meaning.

Why trigrams: (cl x) (cr x). cell left, cell right.

I don't think car and cdr are newbie hostile; they are rather troll-fertile.

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