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I thought the Zen was some of the design philosophy that went into the language itself. (The Wikipedia entry calls it "a collection of 20 software principles t
by logicallee 8y ago
I thought the Zen was some of the design philosophy that went into the language itself. (The Wikipedia entry calls it "a collection of 20 software principles that influences the design of Python Programming Language".)
So at least according to Wikipedia it is a guide. Of course, whether it's applied in practice is a different matter.
- PurpleRamen 8y agoAt the time it was written, python was already around a decade old. There was some discussion about the "true" way of python and some demands to "fix" python, yada yada. Someone demanded some short description of the python philosophy to counter those discussion, and the Zen was made up for this. It's a condensed definition of the philosophy and goals which went into python at that point. A guide to define the borders of the road to good python, but also a guard against those who wanna change the direction of this road.
- logicallee 8y agoInteresting history, thanks. If you can find any sort of cite (maybe a short interview or forum link) I bet you could add this context to the Wikipedia article in a few minutes, it's missing it now.