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"Python's predecessor, ABC, was inspired by SETL -- Lambert Meertens spent a year with the SETL group at NYU before coming up with the final ABC design!" --Guido van Rossum

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2000-August/008...

I have heard that ABC was worked on by Van Rossum, and that it influenced a lot of his design choices in python.

What you may be misremembering is the fact that Smalltalk was a profound influence on Ruby.

Also heavily influenced by C, its first implementation language. Many modules and interfaces are thin wrappers to C. Think os, socket, select, string method names, etc.