The Zen of Python is not much more than a meme. As a nearby comment pointed out, Python doesn't follow it in many ways (explicit vs. implicit comes to mind), and it contradicts itself in several places.

"Readability counts" might be the one exception, at least early on in the language's lifetime. Nowadays it could be argued that even that is diminishing.

But readability is often overlooked by most programming languages, which is a mistake. Programmers (should) spend more time reading than writing code, so it's very important. It's also very difficult to get right, being so subjective, but GvR has a good eye for it, and he made good design choices to balance it with expressiveness.

Readability is also crucial for a language being welcoming to newcomers, and new programmers in general. I think that Python is still the best first language for people learning to program. This is likely the biggest reason for its adoption and popularity today.

I'm not sure they did to be honest. If I had to choose something to attribute the success of python to the general non-programmers i'd say jupyter notebooks are an order of magnitude more important than any of those things mentioned.

Especially when the idea of there being one obvious way of doing things is contradicted in probably the most used package of pandas, and even built in things like list comprehensions vs loops vs itertools, then couple that with the way it does variable passing.

Can't really agree that it is easier to read for laymen than other c-like languages of its day either, with the use of underscores for class methods and indentation defining scope.

Honestly if I wanted to really know why python was successful interviews with the authors of the notebook, pandas and the AI libraries would be my targets, cause in my view they're the ones that made the language a success.

practicality beats purity