There's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI or TIMTOWTDI, pronounced “Tim Toady”) is a Perl motto. The language was designed with this idea in mind, in that it “doesn't try to tell the programmer how to program.” This makes it easy to write extremely messy programs, but, as proponents of this motto argue, it also makes it easy to write concise statements like
print if 1..3 or /match/
or the more traditional
if(1..3 || /match/) {print}
or even the more verbose:
use English; if( $INPUT_LINE_NUMBER >= 1 and $INPUT_LINE_NUMBER <= 3 or $ARG =~ m/match/ ) { print $ARG; }
This motto has been very much discussed in the Perl community, and eventually extended to There’s more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either (TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE, pronounced “Tim Toady Bicarbonate”).[1]
Notably, the Zen of Python has a motto that gives TIMTOWTDI a tip of the hat: “There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it.”[2] This encourages doing things the best way available, with secondary alternatives if use cases require them. Its purpose is to make the language easy to learn and especially easier to read, because when there are many different ways to do the same thing, to understand existing code one has to know them all.