There's more than one way to do it

There's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI or TIMTOWTDI, pronounced Tim Toady) is a Perl programming motto. The language was designed with this idea in mind, in that it “doesn't try to tell the programmer how to program.” As proponents of this motto argue, this philosophy makes it easy to write concise statements like

print if 1..3 or /match/

or the more traditional

if (1..3 or /match/) { print }

or even the more verbose:

use English;
if ($INPUT_LINE_NUMBER >= 1 and $INPUT_LINE_NUMBER <= 3 or $ARG =~ m/match/) {
    print $ARG;
}

This motto has been very much discussed in the Perl community, and eventually extended to There’s more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either (TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE, pronounced Tim Toady Bicarbonate).^[1]

In contrast, part of the Zen of Python is, "There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it."^[2]

See also

• Extensible programming
• Don't repeat yourself
• You aren't gonna need it

References

1. "Can EPO (or TPF) tame TIMTOWTDI?". dev411.com. 2009-01-24.
2. https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

External links

• Perl, the first postmodern computer language by Larry Wall
• There Is More Than One Way To Do It on the WikiWikiWeb