Erik Naggum's writings were pretty influential on me as a young programmer, and there's still some value in this piece, but nowadays I find a lot of this insufferable. Yes, it's not actually easy to implement lists, and there's semantic value to Common Lisp's implementation. But...
1. You can't tout the benefits of constant time appending to the beginning of a list while ignoring the benefits of constant time lookup and modification within the list. And before anyone starts talking about "but most programs don't need random access because you just traverse the list"--yes, and vectors do that better too because of cache locality. Cache-aware implementations of Lisps are still an order of magnitude slower than vectors for traversals because dereferencing the cdr pointer is obligatory. If you start talking about speed being a benefit of Lisp in comparison to C (a comparison which Naggum introduces later here), you've lost the plot.
2. Nostalgia for an architecture that no longer existed even in 1998 when this was written is poor reasoning for opaque names. "car" and "cdr" aren't good names. It kind of doesn't matter much: once you learn them it's fine, but it is a slight barrier to Lisp's success, as it does present yet another small challenge for beginning Lisp programmers.
3. In general, the ragging on Scheme is rather pointless--I found my way to Lisp via Scheme. And a large part of why I ended up back in Scheme land (well, Racket by that point) was that it became clear to me that the Scheme community benefits from ideas learned in Common Lisp, while Common Lisp often (not always) rejects NIH ideas.
1. You can't tout the benefits of constant time appending to the beginning of a list while ignoring the benefits of constant time lookup and modification within the list. And before anyone starts talking about "but most programs don't need random access because you just traverse the list"--yes, and vectors do that better too because of cache locality. Cache-aware implementations of Lisps are still an order of magnitude slower than vectors for traversals because dereferencing the cdr pointer is obligatory. If you start talking about speed being a benefit of Lisp in comparison to C (a comparison which Naggum introduces later here), you've lost the plot.
2. Nostalgia for an architecture that no longer existed even in 1998 when this was written is poor reasoning for opaque names. "car" and "cdr" aren't good names. It kind of doesn't matter much: once you learn them it's fine, but it is a slight barrier to Lisp's success, as it does present yet another small challenge for beginning Lisp programmers.
3. In general, the ragging on Scheme is rather pointless--I found my way to Lisp via Scheme. And a large part of why I ended up back in Scheme land (well, Racket by that point) was that it became clear to me that the Scheme community benefits from ideas learned in Common Lisp, while Common Lisp often (not always) rejects NIH ideas.