Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Terry Reedy]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "James Mills" <prologic at shortcircuit.net.au> writes:
>> You do realize this is a model and not strictly a requirement. Quite
>> a few things in Python are done merely by convention.
>> Don't get caught up.
> 
> But, if something is done by convention, then departing from the
> convention is by definition unconventional.  If you do something
> unconventional in a program, it could be on purpose for a reason, or
> it could be by accident indicating a bug.  
> 
> I don't understand why some folks spew such violent rhetoric against
> the idea of augmenting Python with features to alert you automatically
> when you depart from the convention, so that you can check that the
> departure is actually what you wanted.  A lot of the time, I find, the
> departures are accidental and automated checks would save me
> considerable debugging.

The question is where such checks should be.  Guido prefers separate 
checkers (PyChecker, PyLint) rather than in the interpreter.  If you 
think they are incomplete, help improve one of them.