[0] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/iiip/doc/CommonLISP/HyperSpec...
One of Rich Hickey's goals, stated in many ways and in many of his presentations, was to design a modern lisp not bound by design decisions in old ones. That's why Clojure is not built on or directly based on any specific lisp.
He has made a big point about moving on from lisp-isms such as `car` and `cdr`, which are based on tradition and specific archaic hardware implementation, to modern and within-language-consistent things like `first` and `rest`, which are both self-descriptive and implemented for anything that conforms to the seq protocol, as opposed to `car` and `cdr`, which are tied to cons cells.
I do not recall anything specific that he's said about about the choice of a question mark vs a "p", but I can imagine a similar argument that a question mark is more self-descriptive than "p". "p" only makes sense if you know lisp traditions.
Edit: typo
Also can we finally settle on a name for these things now? If car and cdr are too arcane we can do away with them (though I like being able to do caddadadr) but why do we need "first" and "rest" rather than the already established "head" and "tail"? I particularly dislike "rest" since it's a relative term, i.e. in normal speech saying that you're going to do something with "the rest" of the list means something different depending on how much of the list you already used.
This allows for unified abstract views on things normally distinguished from each other by words, syntax, conventions and mind. This allows stuff like pattern matching generic functional code like the mighty monad with it's transformer.
Learning functional programming incl. higher kinded types (dependent types and such) isn't easy for someone used to e.g. Java,C,C++,Python,Go, and others I can't judge of the top of my head.
If you ask yourself why said functional is beneficial, remember the popularity and typical confusion of the Monad posts/articles. You might not quite understand / "get" it, but they keep coming up and the authors seem intelligent. So you (might) just have a case of the Blub Paradox[0]. You need to understand it to grok it's usefulness/desirability.
(seq collection)
This is hardly a controversial stance. Python, for example, supports iteration over many of its data structures and it is recommended to implement the dunder methods for iteration on any class that might reasonably be the basis of an iteration.
All clojure does is agree that iteration over a lazy sequence is a valuable concept. It implements this as an abstract protocol, rather than as a concrete implementation on linked lists.
We are in agreement here. It seems to me, though, that it is an easy case to make that a question mark makes sense if you know English. Surely this is a convention less dependent upon specific knowledge.
Either way, Clojure is its own language and is not beholden to the tradition of any other language. What is most important is that it chooses a convention and implements it consistently. It is not meant to be Common Lisp nor is it meant to be Scheme, nor Dylan, nor Shen, nor Femtolisp, nor any other implementation. It is meant to be Clojure and what that means is defined by Rich Hickey.
Regarding`first`, `rest`, `head`, and `tail`, I don't think the argument based on English usage is the strongest. `head` and `tail` are established in some other programming languages, almost always as operations upon a link list. Those two words in English refer to body parts on some animals, hardly an obvious analog to generic collections. `first` and `rest` are not unheard of in other programming languages and in English do have a natural connection with the idea of a collection. Again, Clojure is meant only to be what Rich Hickey designed it to be, not a faithful reproduction of any other programming language.
Like Common Lisp, which has `first`...`tenth` and `rest`.
(if (closed handle) ...)
(when (static widget) ...)