That's the philosophy in Python. Instead of checking if you can do something ahead of time, just do it. If it fails, handle it then.
This results in significantly cleaner code, since you generally assume that the code you're writing is going to run correctly (e.g. that you can successfully create a directory in /tmp/ or a pidfile in /var/run).
Python, however, is also dynamically typed, which means that a lot of code is going to run even if you get unexpected input (e.g. 'print "this variable is %s" % somevar' is going to do a reasonable thing for pretty much every possible value of somevar), but it also means that your code might do something with invalid input which only makes sense if you know that your input was invalid (e.g. 'y * 10' is 20 if y is 2, or "2222222222" if y is "2"). C doesn't have that flexibility/curse, so it wasn't really an option for DJB.
This results in significantly cleaner code, since you generally assume that the code you're writing is going to run correctly (e.g. that you can successfully create a directory in /tmp/ or a pidfile in /var/run).
Python, however, is also dynamically typed, which means that a lot of code is going to run even if you get unexpected input (e.g. 'print "this variable is %s" % somevar' is going to do a reasonable thing for pretty much every possible value of somevar), but it also means that your code might do something with invalid input which only makes sense if you know that your input was invalid (e.g. 'y * 10' is 20 if y is 2, or "2222222222" if y is "2"). C doesn't have that flexibility/curse, so it wasn't really an option for DJB.