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Comment by spyspy | Hacker News Reader

> Python especially, with its "one way to do it"

Despite being a core tenet of the language, Python is _really, really_ bad at following that rule. I agree with everything else you're saying, though. Those are still Python idioms even if they originated elsewhere.

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I think people take the "one way to do it" tenet a little too seriously. It comes from PEP20 [1], which to me seems to have a more jestful than dogmatic tone:

> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

> Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

If I remember my history correctly, this was poking fun as Perl's "TIMTOWTDI" [2].

It also says one obvious way to do it. It doesn't preclude there being more than one way.

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to...

In 2004, "There should be only one way to do it" was a more realistic goal. 2004 puts us at Python 2.4 or so, but I think that's just when it got formalized into a PEP, it was around for a while before then. If we step back two years to 2002, we get to Python 2.1. We are now pre-generators, pre-with statement, pre-itertools, pre-decorators, and a lot of other things (useful itertools, etc.). There more often was only one sensible way to do a thing. Python evolved, but PEP20 didn't.

> 2004 puts us at Python 2.4 or so, but I think that's just when it got formalized into a PEP

I didn't notice the date on the PEP, but I think you're right. I remember reading it when I learned Python circa 2002.

Found this (from 1999): https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/1999-June/0019....

The "obvious way" changes over time, as the language improves.

How so? Comprehensions vs loops vs recursive functions vs in some cases map/reduce/filter is the only example I can think of.

There's also strings.

    'foo ' + bar
    'foo {}'.format(bar)
    'foo %s' % bar
    f'foo {bar}'

As well as the string templates almost nobody knows about (https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/string.html#template-str...):

    Template('$foo bar').substitute(foo='foo')

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