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).