> I think most modern programmers prefer explicit destructuring and taking an element from a collection by its key rather than excplicitly traveling node links

> I think most modern programmers prefer explicit destructuring and taking an element from a collection by its key rather than excplicitly traveling node links using car and cadr. Then they'd be happy with Lisp from 40 years ago. Common Lisp (which was not the first to have either feature) has DESTRUCTURING-BIND (as well as some other constructs like extended lambda lists and within LOOP) where you can use destructuring, and it has generic sequence functions that work on more than lists like MAP, REMOVE-IF-NOT, REDUCE, etc, as well as lookup functions for getting things out of key-value maps (list-based or not) by key, or from sequences by index. Explicitly cdring down lists is mostly only done in introductory textbooks. It feels like a lot of Clojure advocacy is written in terms of this "Lisp before Clojure" strawman of some minimalist Scheme subset. Lisp has had arrays, dictionaries, records, etc (with literal syntax and proper accessors), as well as destructuring and generic sequence functions, for almost half a century (more than half a century for some of that). Whether or not you prefer Clojure's syntax for those things, Lisp had those things long before Clojure existed.