“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

I haven't used Python in many years, but it was the first programming language I really could say I loved. Everything was was either completely in tune with my intuition or well-documented.

I had a lot of fun with Python, and I learned a lot about programming by (ab)using it. I am very grateful to Guido van Rossum and the work he has done, and I wish him all the best for his future.

I totally agree with this. In 1999 I had only used C and shell (well lisp a little bit in college), and python was such a breath of fresh air...

Even though I am hardwired to C and 'thinking like a machine would/prefers', python was probably the first and only language I didn't feel like it was a programming language at all. Always when I write something in it, it's always 'huh, and that's it? I'm... done?'. Sure, it's equal part due to language and 'batteries', but neither would happen without GvR and awesome community that built around his project and him. Python, to me, is like lisp without parens and with libraries - the future we were promised. Only thing I, personally, can't do is write large(er/ish) codebases with it. I tend to get lost, but that's probably due to my C-like brain. In any case, thanks for everything!

how is python like lisp?

It's lisp without the curse. You have an arbitrarily dynamic runtime but enough structure and cultural idiom against abusing it that it has flourished. Compare for example type annotations in python versus those in clojure - clojure's expressivity and the culture's tendency to use it pervasively make meaningful annotations much more difficult than in python, even with python's crazy calling convention. Additionally a lot of my data processing python code winds up feeling very lispy - arbitrarily deeply nested iterator pipelines transforming dumb and often immutable data. We largely do this in python because smart objects are slow not out of any pursuit of purity, we have a thriving ecosystem of these kinds of libraries, but the end result feels vaguely similar either way.