We can actually go a little deeper. In a famous pair of papers, "CONS should not actually CONS its arguments", Henry Baker argued that (cons) is emblematic of a class of primitive/simple functions which vanish under continuation-passing style, and that LISPs should deliberately be structured around this fact. These papers directly inspired CHICKEN, the first modern fast LISP runtime.

This is ignoring many Common Lisp specifics which are relevant to the blog post's original code, but I figured that on this example, the historical microscope is appropriate.