Python has a philosophy of ‘There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it’ (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/) rather then Perl’s ‘There’s more than one way to do it’ (Programming Perl Third Edition, Larry Wall et al.). This is great, in theory – it leads to greater consistency between disparate programs and makes it easier for individual programmers to pick up someone else’s code.
The problem comes where the obvious way is not, for whatever reason, the practical way. For example, the obvious way to test if a string begins with another string is to use "string1".startswith("string2"). This is, however, significantly less performant than doing "string1"[7:] == "string2" which means when doing a large number of these tests you have to use this form, despite it not being the obvious method.
Unless you are familiar with Python’s sequence slicing syntax (http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#typesseq) I do not find "string1"[7:] to be obvious (even though I would expect most programmers to be able to hazard a, probably correct, guess to what it does), which means I would precede that line with a # Check if string1 starts with "string2". When I feel the need to comment on a specific line of code it is usually because I do not think what it is doing is sufficiently obvious, which means it violates Python’s ‘There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it’.
