[munificent]

I'm honestly not sure why this sentence starts with "unfortunately".

Linked lists are comically inefficient on modern hardware and naming two of your fundamental operations based on CPU instructions from a chip from the 60s is not what I would call good API design.

[spauldo]

1954, actually. But it's a minor thing. You don't need to know anything about the IBM 704 to write Lisp. A cons cell is a specific data structure and its components have specific, if unusual names. There's a lot of unintuitively named symbols in Lisp that are better targets for criticism than car and cdr.