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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

It's a rule of thumb, not a mantra.

I suppose the hilarious way to argue it would be to say that there is an implicit "all other things being equal" in front of each of those.

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Call it what you want; I'm not arguing it to be pedantic, I think it's a very practical approach. But if you prefer:

All other things being equal, I see no reason to write code that needlessly introduces potential bugs and maintainability issues by ignoring the rule of thumb that explicit trumps implicit.

It's an old argument. I don't have real strong feelings about it. I think there is enough code doing one or the other out there that the end result is to understand well the ramifications of both, so it ends up a matter of taste.

The documentation is pretty clear about it:

http://docs.python.org/release/3.3.4/library/stdtypes.html#t...

Which leads to this:

    >>> a=object()
    >>> bool(a)
    True
    >>>

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