Python vs. Lisp -- please explain

[Roy Smith]

Many people in this thread have said things like:
> Interpreted?  Compiled?  Scripting language?

Let me quote from the preface to "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic 
Programmer's Guide" by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt (aka "the pickaxe 
book").

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In the old days, the distinction between languages was simple: they were 
either compiled, like C or Fortran, or interpreted, like BASIC.  Compiled 
languages gave you speed and low-level access; interpreted languages were 
higher-level but slower.

Times change, and things aren't that simple anymore.  Some language 
designers have taken to calling their creations "scripting languages."  By 
this, we guess they mean that their languages are interpreted and can be 
used to replace batch files and shell scripts, orchestrating the behavior 
of other programs and the underlying operating system.  Perl, TCL, and 
Python have all been called scripting languages.

What exactly *is* a scripting language?  Frankly we don't know if it's a 
distinction worth making.
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I've made several attempts to sound intelligent in this thread, and each 
time, I bailed out before hitting the Post button.  I keep coming back to 
the conclusion that Thomas and Hunt said it better than I possibly could.

BTW, if like Python and haven't looked at Ruby, it's worth a glance.  If 
Python can be called similar to Lisp, then Ruby is even more so.  I'm not 
fond of Ruby's perlesqe syntax, but I like many of the fundamental ideas.