alt Hacker News $ python -c "import this"
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
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!Replies
I discovered this early on in my programming journey and it helped set my philosophical trajectory. Over the years I’ve slowly grokked these items. But it was valuable to have a North Star even before I realized why they were important.
The PEP explicitly says there are 20 of which only 19 are written down and I can't figure out if that is a joke, a deliberate statement, or both.
Interestingly, today this text reads not only as good advice for coders but also as good instructions for agents. Perhaps time to revisit those and make sure the spirit of these adages is captured there
I have cited this poem countless times over the years--sometimes ironically. I'm sad.
More succinctly, you can run this as a module:
$ python -m this # -mthis works tooThis is a lot of wisdom, which you can tell comes from years of experience. I would like all llms of the world to have this as their base prompt.
For some reason, this describes Rust to me way better than it describes Python.
The only thing I never liked about this is complex is better than complicated. Every once in a while there is a post with an “insight” on how they’re different, but it’s the same word! Naming things is hard, but I wish Tim found another word for one of these.
> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Oh boy, that didn't age well for Python language did it? It matches with C++ in growing complexity of syntax features. With a couple dozen ways to write the very same algorithm.
I took this mantra with me when I learned other languages.
Hard to disagree with any of this. RIP.
Thank you, Tim Peters.
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[dead]
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