[Python-ideas] Retire or reword the "Beautiful is better than ugly" Zen clause

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 22:09:06 +0200
Davide Rizzo <sorcio at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In this case, I even see the potential to convey the original message
> in a more powerful way than the current formulation does. I'm not a
> good candidate for this, as the chosen language for this community is
> English, which is not my native language nor a language I feel very
> good at. I appreciate the poetic style of the original, and I think
> that Tim Peters has done an outstanding job at capturing these ideas
> into easy and humor-rich language. The opportunity would be to express
> the idea of aesthetic appeal of code in some way beyond the simplistic
> judgmental labelling of "beautiful" vs "ugly". To be fair, in my
> experience this has been a source of confusion to many Python
> newcomers, as the notion of "beauty", as with any other value
> judgment, is highly relative to the subject evaluating it. I've seen
> people think of the Python community as conceited because they would
> think they possess some absolute metric of beauty.

What this merely shows, IMHO, is that writing programming slogans or
jokes on clothing you wear in public is stupid. Most people who see
them won't understand a word of them, and in some cases may badly
misinterpret them as your example shows.

I used to think I was the only one for whom conference t-shirts could
only serve as pyjamas, but then I read online that others feel the
same...  That was quite reassuring: there are other sane people out
there! ;-)

Regards

Antoine.