I have never seen anyone saying that pythonic refers to some objective truth. It refers to subjective but real concepts as clarity, simplicity, explicit-ness, etc. There is also one thing that is not really pythonic but still important, it's reliability. Here addict is not reliable because it is unclear what happens when you call "addict.get" or other dict built-in methods like keys, items, etc. Something is reliable when it works equally for all values in the value space. dict['x'] is reliable because it works the same even if you replace 'x' by 'get' (or any other immutable value).

Yes, I agree, some measure should be made to avoid overriding methods. Thanks!

Implementing an entire 3rd party python library with behavior almost the same as a defaultdict is unpythonic because a reader of the code base now has to learn an entirely new library for functionality that could be represented in a 10 line extension to defaultdict.

The whole "it must be pythonic" thing bothers me so much sometimes.

Its a shortcut to dismiss someone's views. Having an opinion rejected with a "import this, line N" is... such an annoyance. Some people treat the damn thing like a strict bible

I disagree. "Pythonic" and "Unpythonic" are inherently subjective and are always used as an expression of opinion regarding the consistency of some code, routine or library in relation to the larger body of Python.

Unless it is written PEP8 or by Guido, I would never take a "pythonicism" to be nothing more than short-hand for "I think this is (in)consistent with the larger patterns and traditions of Python as I understand them."