I always felt that Python's "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." was a bit of a mess.
Obviously (to anyone who was around at the time), that plank was written in response to Perl's motto: "There is more than one way to do it."
Zig's original take on this, "Only one obvious way to do things" seems even worse. You see, both languages agree that Perl had it wrong: it is unhelpful to have several different ways to write any future. But they went a little too far: it is not actually bad for it to be possible to write the same thing in more than one way.
Zig's new phrasing: "There is an idiomatic way to do it." captures the CORRECT alternative to Perl's motto. It is not important that there be no alternative ways of writing something, Rather, it is important that there be a single idiomatic way to write it.
I think people criticize that line in the zen of Python because Python has now become very maximalist. On it's own merits, I think "There should be one obvious way to do it" is much better, less clunky, than "There is an idiomatic way to do it".
Also, importantly, the Zen of Python is kinda written as a set of ideas that Python should aspire to ("there should be one obvious way to do it") instead of a sales pitch of Python's merits. I prefer that.
Glad to see "Together we serve the users" come back. I miss the old Zig readme that said Zig comes with an MIT license and a humble request to build software that serves the users.
I saw what changed syntactically. I meant I don't really understand what changed semantically. And whether there is any context to why the change was necessary.
I always felt that Python's "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." was a bit of a mess.
Obviously (to anyone who was around at the time), that plank was written in response to Perl's motto: "There is more than one way to do it."
Zig's original take on this, "Only one obvious way to do things" seems even worse. You see, both languages agree that Perl had it wrong: it is unhelpful to have several different ways to write any future. But they went a little too far: it is not actually bad for it to be possible to write the same thing in more than one way.
Zig's new phrasing: "There is an idiomatic way to do it." captures the CORRECT alternative to Perl's motto. It is not important that there be no alternative ways of writing something, Rather, it is important that there be a single idiomatic way to write it.
Also, importantly, the Zen of Python is kinda written as a set of ideas that Python should aspire to ("there should be one obvious way to do it") instead of a sales pitch of Python's merits. I prefer that.
> - rewordings
> - "memory is a resource" goes without saying
> - emphasize the final point