Common Lisp has functions first, second, last, etc. It has rest too. (first '(a b c d)) returns 'a (rest '(a b c d)) returns '(b c d) (third '(a

Common Lisp has functions first, second, last, etc. It has rest too. (first '(a b c d)) returns 'a (rest '(a b c d)) returns '(b c d) (third '(a b c d)) returns 'c (nth 0 '(a b c d)) returns 'a (nth 1 '(a b c d)) returns 'b (last '(a b c d) 2) returns '(c d) I find these quite intuitive, and after a bit of use one gets accustomed to Lisp's three ancient functions: car, cdr, and cons. car is the same as first and cdr is the same as rest. In comparison to handling lists in more modern languages, Lisp seems overly verbose and a bit cumbersome. To be fair, there has been over half a century of evolution in programming languages since Lisp was originally designed. Early Lisp was an alternative to programming in Fortran II, Fortran IV, or Algol 60. These are very primitive languages with significant hurdles for programmers trying to do non-numeric computations (e.g. AI programs). Lisp's underlying memory model of garbage collected cons cells gave it so much flexibility compared to Fortran's fixed length arrays containing only numbers. Fortran had no dynamic lists, no dynamic vectors or slices, no dictionary/hashmap types, no records or structs, no variable length strings, no sets, no tuples. Assembly language often appeared as a reasonable alternative. Here are a few Fortran if statements appearing in a popular programming book of the 60's (I still have it on my bookshelf): IF (x - 2.1) 40, 40, 30 This if will always jump to either line labeled 40 or line labeled 30 of the program. Here's another: IF(I.GE.20.AND.I.LE.42.AND.J.GE.20.AND.J.LE.42) GO TO 702 Lisp's cond (the special form used like if) may seem odd now, but compared to the other languages of the time it was so much more expressive. Because I'm an Emacs user, I use Lisp frequently just to keep my configuration tweaked the way I like it, but if I was creating an editor like Emacs today I think it would be better to use Python, Javascript, or Lua for the underlying programmable part of the editor. Perhaps Haskell is heading for the same kind of niche that Common Lisp occupies today, remaining important for the ideas it explored and of historical interest but never becoming more popular than it is today.