Programming Philosophy
Python is a multi-paradigm programming language. Rather than forcing programmers to adopt a particular style of programming, it permits several styles: object-oriented programming and structured programming are fully supported, and there are a number of language features which support functional programming and aspect-oriented programming (including by metaprogramming and by magic methods). Many other paradigms are supported using extensions, including design by contract and logic programming.
Python uses dynamic typing and a combination of reference counting and a cycle-detecting garbage collector for memory management. An important feature of Python is dynamic name resolution (late binding), which binds method and variable names during program execution.
Rather than requiring all desired functionality to be built into the language's core, Python was designed to be highly extensible. New built-in modules can be easily written in C, C++ or Cython. Python can also be used as an extension language for existing modules and applications that need a programmable interface. This design of a small core language with a large standard library and an easily extensible interpreter was intended by Van Rossum from the very start because of his frustrations with ABC (which espoused the opposite mindset).
The design of Python offers only limited support for functional programming in the Lisp tradition. However, Python's design philosophy exhibits significant similarities to those of minimalistic Lisp-family languages, such as Scheme. The language has map, reduce and filter functions, and the list comprehensions added in Python 2.0 have since been extended with comprehensions for dictionaries and sets, as well as generator expressions. The standard library has two modules (itertools and functools) that implement functional tools borrowed from Haskell and Standard ML.
While offering choice in coding methodology, the Python philosophy rejects exuberant syntax, such as in Perl, in favor of a sparser, less-cluttered grammar. Python's developers expressly promote a particular "culture" or ideology based on what they want the language to be, favoring language forms they see as "beautiful", "explicit" and "simple". As Alex Martelli put it in his Python Cookbook (2nd ed., p. 230): "To describe something as clever is NOT considered a compliment in the Python culture." Python's philosophy rejects the Perl "there is more than one way to do it" approach to language design in favor of "there should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it".
Python's developers strive to avoid premature optimization, and moreover, reject patches to non-critical parts of CPython which would offer a marginal increase in speed at the cost of clarity. When speed is important, Python programmers tend to try using a JIT compiler such as Psyco or using an alternative language implementation such as PyPy. When pure Python code is not fast enough, time-critical functions can be rewritten in "closer to the metal" languages such as C, or by translating (a dialect of) Python code to C code using tools like Cython.
The core philosophy of the language is summarized by the document "PEP 20 (The Zen of Python)".
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