I always felt that Python's "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." was a bit of a mess.

Obviously (to anyone who was around at the time), that plank was written in response to Perl's motto: "There is more than one way to do it."

Zig's original take on this, "Only one obvious way to do things" seems even worse. You see, both languages agree that Perl had it wrong: it is unhelpful to have several different ways to write any future. But they went a little too far: it is not actually bad for it to be possible to write the same thing in more than one way.

Zig's new phrasing: "There is an idiomatic way to do it." captures the CORRECT alternative to Perl's motto. It is not important that there be no alternative ways of writing something, Rather, it is important that there be a single idiomatic way to write it.