The Zen of Python

Long time Pythoneer Tim Peters wrote this ‘Zen of Python’. It is considered like a summary manual of python’s philosophy.

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
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.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!

Tim Peters

Note:
If you have Python 2.1.2 or later you can read the Philosophy of Python whenever you want by initiating Python and running import this. Just do the following:

$ python
Python 2.2 (default, Jun 15 2014, 16:11:12) 
[GCC 2.95.2 19991024 (release)] on some-os
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> import this