've been involved with python for some years now as of this writing in and have seen it grow from an obscure language into one that is used in some fashion in almost every development organization and solid member of the top four or five most widely-used programming languages in the world it has been fun ride but looking back over the yearsit seems to me that if python truly has single legacyit is simply that python has made quality more central focus in the development world it was almost inevitable language that requires its users to line up code for readability can' help but make people raise questions about good software practice in general probably nothing summarizes this aspect of python life better than the standard library this module-- sort of easter egg in python written by python core developer tim peterswhich captures much of the design philosophy behind the language to see this for yourselfgo to any python interactive prompt and import the module (naturallyit' available on all platforms)import this the zen of pythonby tim peters beautiful is better than ugly explicit is better than implicit simple is better than complex complex is better than complicated flat is better than nested sparse is better than dense readability counts special cases aren' special enough to break the rules although practicality beats purity errors should never pass silently unless explicitly silenced in the face of ambiguityrefuse the temptation to guess there should be one-and preferably only one --obvious way to do it although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're dutch now is better than never although never is often better than *rightnow if the implementation is hard to explainit' bad idea if the implementation is easy to explainit may be good idea namespaces are one honking great idea -let' do more of thoseworth special mentionthe "explicit is better than implicitrule has become known as "eibtiin the python world--one of python' defining ideasand one of its sharpest contrasts with other languages as anyone who has worked in this field for more than few years can attestmagic and engineering do not mix python has not always followed all of these guidelinesof coursebut it comes very close and if python' main contribution to the software world is getting people to think about such thingsit seems like win besidesit looked great on the -shirt sneak preview