You know, the Zen of Python makes a for a really cute thing to read, but even Guido himself has admitted that it requires quite a bit of interpretation and does

You know, the Zen of Python makes a for a really cute thing to read, but even Guido himself has admitted that it requires quite a bit of interpretation and doesn't apply in all cases. Generally, I feel that applying it directly to code is tricky (except for trivial pieces of code like these). I think it's better to treat the Zen of Python as a broad vision for how Python code should look rather than as a concrete set of rules for code. For example, explicit isn't always better than implicit. I mean, by that standard alone, the idea of a garbage collector going around implicitly freeing memory would be terrible.