How explain why Python is easier/nicer than Lisp which has a simpler grammar/syntax?

[Marco Sulla]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 at 22:35, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> This is a common misconception.  Linear iteration and tail recursion are
> equivalent.  The issue is calculating values once versus multiple times.
>   Here is the fast recursion equivalent to the fast iteration.
>
> def fib(n, pair=(1,0)):
>     previous, current = pair
>     if n:
>        return fib(n-1, (current, previous + current))
>     else:
>        return current
>
> for i in range(10): print(fib(i), end=' ')
> # 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34

It seems to me a sort of not persistent caching. If you do:

fib(very_large_number)

without calculating any previous Fibonacci number before, it will be
very slow and you could have a stack overflow.

A language with tail call optimization will execute it faster and with
less memory. Otherwise why asyncio de-facto implemented tail
optimization?

PS: it seems there's a module that implement tail call:
https://github.com/baruchel/tco