[fractalb]

> it would really be more complicated in C if a and b were actually strings or lists

You don't event need strings or lists for that. Just imagine bigger numbers for a and b. Arbitrarily long integer addition is not a native language feature in C.

edit: formatting

[082349872349872]

to be concrete:

    fac = lambda n: 1 if n<=1 else n*fac(n-1)
    a, b = fac(42), fac(69)
    a + b

is 3 lines of python; how many lines of C code would it take to execute?

[tgv]

One: return 1.7112245243e98

Joking aside: these are not catch-all comparisons. Nor is the article. But Python is mucher slower and much safer than C. It's easier to start in Python than in C.

[082349872349872]

;-P Just to be pedantic, if you're going to all the trouble to give (modulo lack of a repl) a wrong answer fast, might as well do it really quickly:

    return 0;

in the hopes that compiles down to something like:

    xor rax, rax
    ret