> car and cdr worked for Lisp because, during the '70s, Lisp as a whole was novel enough to gain a sizable following. It doesn't work today. (And note that, even then, Lisp lost a lot of potential users due to the S-expression based syntax.) I'm firmly in the "first" and "rest" camp

first and rest are bad names for what car and cdr do, in the general case. If you have "Jenny" mapped to "867-5309" in a dictionary, then getting the "Jenny" part of that binding with first and the "867-5309" part with rest doesn't really make any sense. Similarly, if you have a node in a binary search tree, getting the subtree with the lesser elements with first and the subtree with the greater elements with rest also doesn't make any sense.

Lisp, even in the 70s, uses first and rest as synonyms for car and cdr for the case where you are operating on a list. first and rest do not make sense as replacements for car and cdr in the general case, however, and if all you want is to have them as synonyms for when they do make sense, then Lisp has been providing that since the 70s.