Comment by astine

I think that the author's complaint is that cons cells are too low level a construct to be exposed so prominently to the user. I think he would prefer that it was abstracted over with some higher level interface the way a lot of other language do it. He mentions Clojure as a Lisp that gets it right in his opinion and that's exactly what Clojure does. Cons cells are still available as a construct, but the default method for interacting with lists is a set of higher level functions that also work on arrays and other sequences and don't require that you think as much about the implementation of the lists.