Help understanding the decisions *behind* python?

[Inky 788]

On Jul 20, 12:27 pm, Phillip B Oldham <phillip.old... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> [snip] 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.

My guess is that it was probably for optimization reasons long ago.
I've never heard a *good* reason why Python needs both.