Sorry, I guess I didn't express my point well. What I'm trying to say is that it is problematic for a community to have these kinds of overarching statements about their communal philosophy, when that communal philosophy is not, in fact, shared by all members of the community in a consistent way.

This results in one person saying one thing that means one thing, and another saying something completely different, but both are pointing to the same set of "first principles" as their guide. In my opinion, this is problematic.

Not having 'one way' of doing things is a good thing.

I absolutely agree. But that's not a very Pythonic way to think about things: "There should be one--and preferably only one--obvious way to do it." (See what I'm saying?)

Listen, I'm not trying to talk shit about the Python community, or claim the Ruby community is a consistent exemplar of the best in programming language community behavior--if anything, the norms in the community merely fit my personality better. And I acknowledged in my original post that the Ruby community errs on the side of normativism to a fault at times: this is something it would appear you've experienced. In fact, I don't really want to be identified as a member of this community or that one, in the end I want to be viewed as a developer who considers the tools he is using from a more expansive perspective.

I'm merely pointing out my observations as a developer, with (as it so happens), a lot of recent experience in Ruby, who is starting to program Python. I think the Python community, insofar as there are a group of people who identify as a part of the Python community, could benefit from some outside perspective. Outside perspective is good sometimes, right?