Python's "only one way to do it" philosophy isn't good?

[Robert Brown]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> writes:
> Graham talks about 25% of the Viaweb code base being macros. Imagine how
> productive his coders would have been if the language was not quite
> so minimalistic, so that they could do what they wanted without the
> _lack_ of syntax getting in the way.

Paul Graham's Viaweb code was written in Common Lisp, which is the least
minimalistic dialect of Lisp that I know.  Even though they were using this
powerful tool, they still found it useful to create new syntactic
abstractions.  How much less productive would they have been had they not
had this opportunity?