The actual text:

  $ python -c 'import this' | grep way
  There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
  Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

There are many layers to this, but the most important thing to point out is that having only one obvious way is just a preference (or ideal). In practice, any deliberate attempt to prevent something logical from working is counter-productive, and there is really no way to control what other people think is or isn't "obvious". And we all sometimes just expect things to work very differently than they actually do, even in ways that might seem bizarre in retrospect. We can't all "be Dutch" all the time.

But let me dig into just one more layer. Pay attention to the hyphens used to simulate em-dashes, and how they're spaced, versus what you might think of as "obvious" ways to use them. I'm assured that this is a deliberate joke. And of course, now that we have reasonably widespread Unicode support (even in terminals), surely using an actual emdash character is the "obvious" way. Or is it? People still have reasons for clinging to ASCII in places where it suffices. Then consider that this was written in 2004. What was your environment like at that point? How old was Unicode at that point? What other options did you have (and which ones did you have to worry about) for representing non-ASCII characters? (You can say that all those "code pages" and such were all really Unicode encodings, but how long did it take until people actually thought of them that way?) On the other hand, Python had a real `unicode` type since 2.0, released in 2001. But who do you know who used it? On yet another hand, an emdash in a terminal will typically only be one column wide (just as an 'm' character is), and barely visually distinct from U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS. (And hackers will freely identify "dash" with this character, while Unicode recognizes 25 characters as dashes: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Pd) Reasonable people can disagree on exactly when it should have become sensible to use actual emdashes, or even whether it is now. Or on whether proper typography is valuable here anyway.