There was a huge chart of the history of programming languages at my university. It showed which ones influenced others, and I'd look at it often. Oddly enough I didn't pay much attention to Python at the time focusing on all the lines coming into and out of Java. I've since discovered Python and really wish I could see that chart again. While this is very different it gave me a piece of that magic again. Thank you for posting this. :-)
Python is fairly conservative; as far as languages go, probably not the most interesting, which is exactly its charm.
I would group Python with Pike and Icon, as 2-week programming languages. It takes about 2-weeks of practice to start writing useful, sophisticated programs in them. Icon is the more interesting one of the three, it's a modern SNOBOL dialect with generators.
