4 ms·

This is very much TIMTOWTDI. Larry Wall would be proud.

• ben509 8y ago
  I think part of the reason Wall adopted TIMTOWTDI as a design is because he observed that it's what happens anyway, so you may as well embrace it.
• ken 8y ago
  The first time I used Python on a team, I learned that "One Obvious Way" was a lie. In order to achieve OOW, you need really high-level features (assembly language programmers have every possible way to accomplish a task!), but also a very limited set of them (so nobody can pick the 'wrong' one). But as a general-purpose programming language, users also need power and flexibility. It's an unstable tripod where as soon as one starts getting higher, you mess up the others. I can tell they've been trying to slowly raise all three (and deprecate/remove old and lower-level pieces from the bottom), but it's a delicate balancing act, and it's easy to run into other constraints, like complexity.