> A programmer want to instruct the computer to do something, without having to care about how it works.

This is not true, as a programmer you need to choose carefully your data structures because they matter, for example there is a difference between doing a lookup on an indexed field in an SQL database and a field that is not indexed. As a programmer you care because it impacts the performance of your application.

The linked discussion explains the difference between list and tuple in this instance.

@rhettinger: while this is not hard to fix, there is no mention in the documentation about why this choice has been made. A beginner don't know about the internals of cPython, should we add a small note about the optimization done with tuple?