It's not surprising that the walrus operator encountered stiff resistance among Pythonistas. It goes against the grain of the language. Pythonistas want their code to be as clear as possible, not as concise, as efficient or as pretty as possible. Any statement or operator that does more than one thing is automatically suspect. Furthermore, as stated in the video, there was already a perfectly good assignment operator and Pythonistas don't appreciate language redundancy, they want there to be only one way to do things. Guido should have decided against the walrus operator, no matter how many other languages have something similar. That's just the way Python should be. I would judge its addition to the language as a leadership failure.,(reply>), "This rule is included to simplify the choice for the user between an assignment statement and an assignment expression -- there is no syntactic position where both are valid. [...] Most importantly, since := is an expression, it can be used in contexts where statements are illegal, including lambda functions and comprehensions. Conversely, assignment expressions don't support the advanced features found in assignment statements..." --PEP 572,(reply>), Don't appreciate language redundancy? What about the three completely different syntaxes for formatting strings + string formatter module?