> there should be one obvious way to do it In cases like this, different ways to do it (all equally good) are needed to get a good coverage of different tastes

> there should be one obvious way to do it In cases like this, different ways to do it (all equally good) are needed to get a good coverage of different tastes in obviousness and different nuances in the task. The point is not uniformity, but avoiding the unpleasant and convoluted workarounds caused by non-obviousness (thus making the language easy to use). String formatting is not trivial: there is the split (sometimes architectural, sometimes of taste, sometimes of emphasis) between concatenating string pieces, applying a format to objects, setting variable parts in templates, and other points of view; and there is a variety of different needs (cheap and convenient printing of data, dealing with special cases, complex templates...)