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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Sorry Pythonistas, but whenever you say that having "only one way" to do something is a good point (and many have said this), you sound like religious nutjobs.

There's more than one good and obvious way to do anything worth doing, be it giving birth, building a bridge, adding two numbers together, or developing algorithms in a programming language.

I like Python on many levels - particularly the indentation - but the religious-ness of the philosophy and language design is off-putting in so many other ways.

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> I like Python on many levels - particularly the indentation - but the religious-ness of the philosophy and language design is off-putting in so many other ways.

I think you're overgeneralizing from a single misquotation. I've rarely encountered dogmatism from pythonistas, as most of them are too busy getting stuff done.

Well, for me, it is a good point. For some reason it's just much easier for me to remember a particular language's way of doing something when there's only one way.

Also, I'm a little obsessive about my code consistency, so I dislike having to remember that I've been using Array#size instead of Array#length, for instance.

Now, these are obviously not necessarily applicable to anyone else. However, I do feel like I can say that having only one way to do simple things is a plus, without being a "religious nutjob". Which is kind of inflammatory of you to say, by the way.

There's a big difference between a person stating an opinion or a preference, as you have, and a community standard being defined and defended to the hilt. The first is choice; the second is religion.

People who blindly defend Python's wacky standards as some sort of community issue are the religious nutjobs, not people like you who merely have a personal preference.

So, no, you're not necessarily a religious nutjob. But, yes, it was meant to inflammatory; people who blindly defend groupthink deserve to have their cages shaken from time to time.

> having "only one way" to do something is a good point (and many have said this)

I've heard this said often but never actually witnessed it in Python. There seem to be multitudes of ways of doing all sorts of things. The other day I wanted to execute an external process and capture it's output. 5 minutes of research with Google and dozens of alternatives before my eyes and oh my ... how do I choose?

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