Comment by lispm

> but that car and cdr DID. Clojure deliberately left them out, as a design choice.

Clojure doesn't have the concept of Lisp's linked lists, thus it does not have its operators.

Note that where the link now points to is something different. Originally this was the link: http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Clojure/origin-of-car-and...

> Clojure deliberately left them out, as a design choice.

I don't think they were 'left out'. That's not how Clojure was designed, IIRC. Clojure is not first Lisp minus the arcane names, plus second then the new stuff. It's a new language from start, not Lisp with names left out. Hickey did not start with Lisp and redesigned it. He started with a new language, based on ideas like immutable persistent lazy sequences, host language integration with easy interoperation, some Lisp ideas like s-expressions and macros, ... I don't think he thought, 'I leave CAR and CDR out'. There was no place for them, since he designed the language Clojure around different data structure concepts.