Improving Your Python Productivity

http://ozkatz.github.com/improving-your-python-productivity.html

by ozkatz • 14 years ago

173 26 14 years ago

ozkatz.github.com

kbd• 14 years ago

Not a very helpful article. Far from a general "improve your Python productivty", it's more like "here are some minor random Python features that I think are useful".

TLDR:

* Use dict and set comprehensions.

* Use collections.Counter.

* Use json.dumps or the pprint module for pretty printing.

* Create simple web services with Python's XML-RPC library.

* Use open source libraries...

tbatterii• 14 years ago

yep, my sentiments exactly. nothing at all having to do with productivity.

draven• 14 years ago

tl;dr: know the stdlib and the ecosystem well.

etrain• 14 years ago

As we move toward languages with big standard libraries, productivity becomes more and more about knowing what you don't have to do yourself.

Case in point - even as a Python veteran, I've never seen/used collections.Counter before. It'll save me from writing the same stupid three lines over and over, and is probably implemented faster than I naively do. I'd say that this will improve my productivity.

conesus• 14 years ago

Could not agree with you more. The more advanced I become with a language, the more I like to go back to even basic docs and read the small-print fancy uses for built-ins. This article touches on a number of them, and it's tricks like this that help you write better code (when used responsibly, of course).

d0mine2• 14 years ago

Usually collections.defaultdict is faster than collections.Counter. But the latter is more concise to use.

darkarmani• 14 years ago

The biggest problem is having to use old LTS distros in production that only have python 2.6 for example. I'm glad that most LTS versions are soon to be using python 2.7.

I know 2.7 has been around for a long time, but so much production software is running on RHEL/Centos systems with 2.6.

eddyweb• 14 years ago

As someone just said on reddt #4 reminds me of python -m SimpleHTTPServer. Very useful, even when you are not coding in Python!

dmnd• 14 years ago

#3 is also usable from the shell in a similar way:

    echo '{"foo":1, "bar":[1,2,3]}' | python -m json.tool

Zoophy• 14 years ago

Whitespace as syntax? Really?

xxpor• 14 years ago

Have you never seen python before?

agumonkey• 14 years ago

Let's call it canonical offside rule.

recursive• 14 years ago

Yes really. If you have any further questions about the python language specification, you can answer them here: http://docs.python.org/3/reference/

masklinn• 14 years ago

Flashnews:mostmodernlanguagesdoindeedusewhitespaceassyntax.

sneak• 14 years ago

It's more likely than you think.

d0mine2• 14 years ago

Here's a good explanation about whitespace in Python http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk

buster• 14 years ago

Despite the negative comments here, it's always good to be reminded of some of nice built-in things. Reminds me how awesome pythons standard functionality really is.

tutuca• 14 years ago

Lately HN is full of lame remarks, unhelpfull criticisim and general arrogancy.

Aykroyd• 14 years ago

Agreed. I use python a lot and I hadn't seen that dict comprehensions had been back-ported to 2.7. So while the rest of it wasn't super useful to me, that was.

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

After reading a few comments here I'm surprised there's no "Effective Python" book already (given the age of Python itself).

In Java and .NET, that's what we try to do everyday: writing idiomatic Java/C# code (style, architecture, patterns, standard libs, etc).

sateesh• 14 years ago

Though I have yet to come across book titled "Effective Python", books like "Python Essential Reference" by David Beazly and "Python Cook Book" covers lot of ares that you mention above.

gbog• 14 years ago

One single productivity python I'd like to share here is to use 'string foo'.partition(' ') instead of splitting. The reason is the edge cases are better handled with partition: you always get a 3-tuple, no matter what. No need to precheck that the split is here, or to postcheck the length of the splitted list.

takluyver• 14 years ago

On the other hand, .split() with no argument splits on any amount of whitespace (\s+, as a regex). That's often quite a useful edge case to have handled for you. You can also do .split(c, 1) to limit it to a single split. It could still split 0 times, though - it just depends which edge cases you want to handle.

fionabunny• 14 years ago

I was hoping to find some mention of IDE, IDE plugin, or more process oriented stuff, rather than language features.

Improving Your Python Productivity

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