Help understanding the decisions *behind* python?

[Phillip B Oldham]

My colleagues and I have been working with python for around 6 months
now, and while we love a lot of what python has done for us and what
it enables us to do some of the decisions behind such certain
data-types and their related methods baffle us slightly (when compared
to the decisions made in other, similarly powerful languages).

Specifically the "differences" between lists and tuples have us
confused and have caused many "discussions" in the office. We
understand that lists are mutable and tuples are not, but we're a
little lost as to why the two were kept separate from the start. They
both perform a very similar job as far as we can tell.

Consider the following:

>>> x = [2,1,3]
>>> x.sort()
>>> print x
[1, 2, 3]

Now, if the sort operations were unable to affect the original
structure of the list (as in JavaScript) you'd effectively have a
tuple which you could add/remove from, and the example above would
look more like:

>>> x = [2,1,3]
>>> print x.sort()
[1, 2, 3]
>>> print x
[2,1,3]

This make a lot more sense to us, and follows the convention from
other languages. It would also mean chaining methods to manipulate
lists would be easier:

>>> x = [2,1,3]
>>> print x.sort()[0]
3
>>> print x
[2,1,3]

We often find we need to do manipulations like the above without
changing the order of the original list, and languages like JS allow
this. We can't work out how to do this in python though, other than
duplicating the list, sorting, reversing, then discarding.

We're not looking to start any arguments or religious wars and we're
not asking that python be changed into something its not. We'd simply
like to understand the decision behind the lists and tuple structures.
We feel that in not "getting" the difference between the two types we
may be missing out on using these data structures to their full
potential.