Comment by kazinator

8 years ago

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

7 comments

kazinator

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lisper  8 years ago

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.

  • kbp  8 years ago

    > 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?

    • lisper  8 years ago

      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.

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