A chain of first/second/rest/nth is also unreadable, as is the equivalent using plain car/cdr. Lists should not be used as a substitute for defining a structure with properly named slots.
I am a big fan of Lisp but it is an old language family that comes with some baggage. The "list processing" view of the language is part of that baggage. One of the greatest shortcomings of Common Lisp is the lack of standardized data structures -- no binary search trees, no priority queues, etc. The language encourages people to use lists as a one-size-fits-all structure, to the detriment of readability, maintainability, and often efficiency.
Sure, constructs like cdaddr have not created the mountain of bugs that we see from the "traditions" of C, but I suspect that has more to do with what you said: cdaddr is rarely used. Most professional Lisp programmers would find a better way to write their code, almost certainly using defstruct to define complex data structures and only using lists when they need list semantics.
I am a big fan of Lisp but it is an old language family that comes with some baggage. The "list processing" view of the language is part of that baggage. One of the greatest shortcomings of Common Lisp is the lack of standardized data structures -- no binary search trees, no priority queues, etc. The language encourages people to use lists as a one-size-fits-all structure, to the detriment of readability, maintainability, and often efficiency.
Sure, constructs like cdaddr have not created the mountain of bugs that we see from the "traditions" of C, but I suspect that has more to do with what you said: cdaddr is rarely used. Most professional Lisp programmers would find a better way to write their code, almost certainly using defstruct to define complex data structures and only using lists when they need list semantics.