Lisp’s Most Sacred Functions Are a 1950s Hardware Hack Nobody Bothered to Rename
CAR and CDR — the two most fundamental functions in Lisp — aren’t elegant mathematical abstractions. They’re named after hardware registers on the IBM 704, a machine from the 1950s that hasn’t run in decades. The ‘purest’ language in computer science is built on pragmatic hardware hacks that survived purely through inertia. And that tells you everything about how software actually evolves.