The difference is that Clojure does not have cons cells with CAR and CDR like in Lisp. The special dot notation (a . b) does not exist in Clojure. Clojure has something like cons, but they don't work like in Lisp.
In Lisp the cons cells are the building blocks for ALL list like data structures: lists, circular lists, cons trees, etc. CAR and CDR can have arbitrary contents: (1 . 2) describes a valid cons cell. In Lisp the function CONS accepts two arbitrary objects and returns a cons cell.
Where in Clojure the dot notation for cons cells does not exist and where the function cons is a function which accepts an object as first argument and a seq as second argument. It returns a seq. No such function exists in Lisp.
Thus CAR and CDR would not make no sense for Clojure, because it does not support CONS cells with CAR and CDR. It uses seqs (etc.) instead.
In Lisp there is a style convention that the names FIRST, SECOND, ... and REST should be used in code which uses conses as lists. When conses are used to build trees (which are not lists), the operators CAR, CDR and related are preferred.
In Lisp the cons cells are the building blocks for ALL list like data structures: lists, circular lists, cons trees, etc. CAR and CDR can have arbitrary contents: (1 . 2) describes a valid cons cell. In Lisp the function CONS accepts two arbitrary objects and returns a cons cell.
Where in Clojure the dot notation for cons cells does not exist and where the function cons is a function which accepts an object as first argument and a seq as second argument. It returns a seq. No such function exists in Lisp.
Thus CAR and CDR would not make no sense for Clojure, because it does not support CONS cells with CAR and CDR. It uses seqs (etc.) instead.
In Lisp there is a style convention that the names FIRST, SECOND, ... and REST should be used in code which uses conses as lists. When conses are used to build trees (which are not lists), the operators CAR, CDR and related are preferred.