Practicality Beats Purity: The Zen of Python’s Escape Hatch?

The Zen of Python, the well known list of 20 Python aphorisms (of which only 19 are written down), contains a lot of prescriptive advice for what makes "Good" Python code… or it would, if one of them didn't give you permission to ignore the rest of them.

Focusing on one piece of the 19 aphorisms, this talk explores the contradictions in the Zen of Python's advice, and how even with prescriptive rules, writing "Good" Python remains a subjective exercise.

About Christopher Neugebauer

Christopher Neugebauer is an Australian developer, speaker, and serial community conference organiser, who presently lives in the United States.

He recently served as a Director and Vice-Chair of the Python Software Foundation, and when All This is not currently preventing it, is co-organiser of the acclaimed North Bay Python conference, a boutique one-track conference run in a live music venue in Petaluma, California.

By day, Christopher is an engineer at Toolchain, working on the open source Pants build system, helping make Python’s testing, correctness, and style tools accessible and fast for developers, no matter how big their codebase.