Comment by yellowapple

At the risk of some bikeshedding:

    The name "car" is McCarthy's. It's a reference to the architecture of 
    the first computer Lisp ran on. But though the name is a historical 
    accident, it works so well in practice that there's no reason to 
    change it.

While I understand the rationale here, would this not have been a good opportunity to encourage something a bit less vestigial than "car" and "cdr"? Say, "head" and "tail"? Or "left" and "right"? A lot of things come to mind when seeing a bunch of cars and cdrs and such everywhere in Lisp code, and "works so well in practice" ain't exactly one of them, IMO.