>> There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it
And then it offers 20 equally good ways: generators vs comprehensions vs iterators vs foreach loops vs map and filter, async vs threadpools vs processpools, and so on.
It's tough to adhere to that principle, but its nice to see as a focus. Python wasn't even object oriented originally (and a lot of their standard library shows it). Guido has said he wishes he never added functional concepts like map and filter. Deprecating things hasn't been taken too well by the community.
The first public release of Python, 0.9.1, was object-oriented. It had classes, and everything was an object internally, although admittedly not every type had methods yet (from a user perspective), esp. immutable types like tuples, strings and numbers. These methods wouldn't appear until 2.0, if I recall correctly. Types like lists and dicts had methods from the start.
