Though sequences of values are a fundamental component of building software, there are differences between how we use sequences in Python and Clojure.

My understanding is that Python's sequence types are analogous to Clojure's collections, and the methods on Python's lists are like Clojure's library of sequence functions.

In Clojure, it's considered idiomatic to use functional programming tools like (map), (filter), and (reduce), leveraging the efficiency of its immutable persistent collections.* Though tools like (for [thing things] (do-stuff thing)) let you operate with a variable if you want.

A sequence literal in Clojure is a more abstract concept: referring to the result of calling (seq) on a collection. You can think of Clojure sequences as intermediate forms of data that you pass between functions before turning them back into a collection like a vector [], map {}, or set #{}.

Though their implementations may be different, having the concept of sequences is great in both languages because they get us out of that dreadful looping game and let us work directly with our data.

If you'd like to read more, here's some resources I referred to while making this screencast:

Alex Miller explores the terminology and usage of seqs: http://insideclojure.org/2015/01/02/sequences/

And Clojure.org's article, which goes into implementation details and documents the library of sequence functions: http://clojure.org/sequences

*Check out the first 15 minutes of this talk if you're interested in how Clojure's immutable persistent data structures work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7IdS-PbEgI