Back in 2000, Peter Norvig was getting complaints that the code in his and Stuart Russell’s book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach was in Lisp, that many of the students using the book didn’t know Lisp, and that they didn’t have time to learn it in the single term of the course. Norvig started looking around for a more “traditional” language—although I’m not sure how, other than Fortran, a language could be more traditional than Lisp—to use as a second implementation language. After a bit of investigation he determined that Python would be a good fit for the second language.
He says, “Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with ”traditional“ syntax (what Lisp people call ”infix“ or ”m-lisp“ syntax).” He wrote a handy page to explain Python for Lisp programmers. For various odd reasons, I’ve found myself needing to write a bit of Python lately. I used to use it a lot but stopped almost completely when I started using Lisp, Scheme, and Elisp.
His page is, therefore, really useful to me. If you’re a Lisp programmer and need to learn or refresh your knowledge of Python, this is a resource you should look at. As I say, it’s from 2000 so there’s no Python 3 coverage but it does a good job of explaining Python 2.7.