I think the fundamental "disconnect" is this issue of mutability and immutability that people talk about (mainly regarding tuples and whether they should be thought of as static lists or not)
Coming from VBA I have a tendency to think of everything as an array... So when I create the following test=[1,2],[3,4],[5,6] I'm annoyed to find out that I can change do the following test[1][1] = 3 but i can't do test[1] = [3,3] and so I throw tuples out the window and never use them again... The mental disconnect I had (until now) was that my original tuple was in affect "creating" 3 objects (the lists) within a 4th object (the tuple)... Previously, I'd been thinking of the tuple as one big object (mentally forcing them into the same brain space as multi-dimensional arrays in VBA) This was a nice "aha" moment for me... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
