Not sure, but by the context of the conversation, it seems he complained people keeps saying lisp was an inspiration for Python, when in fact he was not even thinking about it by the time Python was created. Then it appears someone asked him what he actually based on then, and he answered abc, shell, awk. But given the lost message in the thread, perhaps you can ask him for clarification, to set the record straight.

i see, thanks!

yeah, i think it's well-known that lambda, map, filter, and reduce (the lispy bits of python) weren't in the earliest versions of python; they were contributed later on by a lisp fan

at a larger remove, of course, lisp was an inspiration for abc (via lcf and setl), shell (via algol), and awk (in a smaller way)

I may be wrong, but I think apply() was there in an early version of python, maybe 1.5.

1.5 was several years later

but it was also several years ago, which is when I first started playing around with python, before starting to do production work with it a few years later.

so in one sense, i.e. compared to the present, 1.5 is an early version.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

all true