There are reasons Java is used widely, just like there were reasons Cobol was used widely. Now, car and cdr are just vestigially named, that is true. On the ot

There are reasons Java is used widely, just like there were reasons Cobol was used widely. Now, car and cdr are just vestigially named, that is true. On the other hand, things like endp actually make sense--the p is a convention telling you that endp returns a boolean. It's short for predicate. I personally like Scheme's convention to name procedures like that end?, but endp also makes sense. Also, the gui package in Java, for example, isn't really part of the language; it's part of the standard library. I don't see why that is a particularly big advantage, especially because you are not guaranteed to have it everywhere your code will run--for example, I don't think you have access to all of those libraries on Java ME. Ease of reading is also a matter of habit. I actually find lisp code easier to read than most Java code, largely because the Java code tends to have a lot of random cruft (anonymous inner classes implementing a single method, for example).