Comprehensions and Generators
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."– Bruce Lee
We love this quote from Bruce Lee. He was such a wise man! The second part in particular, "hack away at the unessential," is to us what makes a computer program elegant. After all, if there is a better way of doing things so that we don't waste time or memory, why wouldn't we?
Sometimes, there are valid reasons for not pushing our code up to the maximum limit: for example, sometimes, in order to achieve a negligible improvement, we have to sacrifice readability or maintainability. Does it make any sense to have a web page served in 1 second with unreadable, complicated code, when we can serve it in 1.05 seconds with readable, clean code? No, it makes no sense.
On the other hand, sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to try to shave off a millisecond from a function, especially when the function...