Guido van Rossum is Dutch. Wouldn't it stand to reason that someone who's Dutch wrote the tutorial? If so, then it's not a stretch to imagine that English was second language to that person.

Personally, being a native English speaker, I'm not going to bust somebody's chops for writing a tutorial/guide/whatever that appears to be English as a Second Language. English is the de facto universal language, like Latin used to be, and so I expect to see "interesting" usages of the language. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

In short, because it was.

ReStructured Text (.rst) source for the documentation is in the CPython GitHub repository: https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/main/Doc/tutorial . You can see for yourself the commit histories and get a sense of who wrote the text.

Many core devs and other Python contributors are ESL. This should hardly be surprising; English is only the first language of about 26% of its speakers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language). Guido van Rossum is, as the name would suggest, Dutch - a fact that Tim Peters also alluded to in the Zen of Python. The original commits for the tutorial appear to be from Georg Brandl (https://github.com/birkenfeld), who is German (again as the name would suggest).

The tutorial has seen quite little maintenance work over the years - and a lot of it was done by core devs already distracted by Python itself, and who typically have no particular background in education and quite a bit of background in C.

If you want to help, you can get involved via the issue tracker (there's a template for reporting documentation issues), the Python Discourse forum at https://discuss.python.org (there's a tag/section for documentation), or the Discord server (https://discord.gg/sMWqvzXvde). There are also monthly meetings of the "documentation community" held on Google Meet. For more information in general, see https://docs-community.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html.

I'm guessing that some parts are but I did not find anything glaring in the intro. I admit though I did not read the entire thing let alone even past to toc.

I guess I have to ask what is the issue if it was, and if there is a problem have you submitted a bug or joined the documentation forums?

Page title: The Python Tutorial

The official python tutorial is poorly written and hard to understand in several places. How is someone new to the language supposed to learn a language when the official documentation is in such a state?