Definition of Pythonic?

[Emmanuel Surleau]

On Saturday 11 April 2009 18:00:58 John Yeung wrote:
> On Apr 11, 10:08 am, Emmanuel Surleau <emmanuel.surl... at gmail.com>
>
> wrote:
> > Having written a few trivial scripts in Python, I'm curious as
> > to how you would sum up the Pythonic philosophy of development.
>
> A couple of others have already mentioned the Zen of Python, available
> at the Python command prompt.  I would agree with that, but also add
> the caveat that none of the principles expressed there are hard-and-
> fast rules.  Hopefully that is clear from the quasi-contradictory
> nature of the principles, but inevitably there will be some people who
> complain that Python breaks this or that "rule" from the Zen.

Thank you all for the nice and prompt replies to what is a typical newbie 
question, which is bound to come back regularly. And no, you can't make 
everybody happy, per definition.

> The fact is, it's impossible to satisfy every principle in every
> situation.  To me, Python distinguishes itself for how well it
> balances all of them.  "Compromise" is a word that comes up a lot when
> talking about the design of Python.  To some, that has a negative
> connotation; to me, it's an inevitable consequence of being practical.


That's fine with me: after all, you can't do software engineering without 
trade-offs.

Cheers,

Emm