It's "Lisp-like" in the sense that it's garbage-collected and has an interpreter for incremental development, rather than only being batch-compiled. If PG were

It's "Lisp-like" in the sense that it's garbage-collected and has an interpreter for incremental development, rather than only being batch-compiled. If PG were a Smalltalk fan, though, he would probably be talking about how every language is getting more Smalltalk-like (the above, plus class-based OO in the core language). It says at least as much about him as it does language design. Python's lambdas are quite a bit less powerful than any Lisp's, and it doesn't have any tail call optimization. It's like, you can kinda sorta do functional programming in C, you just need to recast function pointers and do manual memory allocation. Python is carefully designed to encourage programming in a certain relatively straightforward style, and while you can force some FP techniques into it, it doesn't sit well with the rest of the language, and it's kind of unfair to anybody else who will have to deal with the code down the road. While I don't have much experience working with web frameworks (not my thing at the moment), Python is a very good all-purpose language.