Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python

[@rafehqazi8539]

Note to Python 3 Users: - izip is just zip - d.iteritems() is just d.items() - To use defaultdict: You have to do the following --> from collections import defaultdict

[@suburbanmoscow9067]

Rafeh Qazi thx for the additional info

[@CleverProgrammer]

Woah, did not notice my comment was sitting at 65 likes haha. I now have my own computer programming KZbin channel! Thanks for commenting Suburban and making me see this!

[@suburbanmoscow9067]

You are welcome. I will check out your channel as well! Cheers

[@javierRC82857]

Rafeh Qazi but in Python 2.7 zip is an iterator? izip,zip or range,xrange why not use iterator for everything and let the programmer choose if he want expand the list?

[@nmertsch8725]

Javier I'm not sure if this is what you asked for, but you can use "list(range(x))" or "list(zip(x,y))", if you really want to have a list instead of an iterable object.

[@jeffkirchoff14]

Man YT recommended it after 8 yrs In search of gold I found diamond

[@qg4091]

This guy is seriously amazing, love his style of teaching

[@johncherry108]

Pity his ego needs to be continuously stroked with applause.

[@Pulsar77]

John Cherry Oh FFS, it's a joke. First rule of becoming a Python programmer: have a sense of humor.

[@heinzguderian9980]

He reminds me a bit too much of a pastor for me to be completely comfortable, (like from a Pentecostal church or something). Or an unctuous salesman telling us about his schemes. Material was great, though.

[@DimitrisK5]

@@johncherry108 It's one of his techniques to keep the audience engaged. He is an excellent speaker and he obviously does that on purpose. You might also notice that he asks the audience all the time if they learnt something new, or how many knew that, or what's the problem with this piece of code, etc.. On top of that, he makes me (and I assume other people, too) feel like we are part of the Python family; the core team seems close and approachable and I get a feeling of belonging to this line of developers who transformed the way we think about human programming forever.

[@KurzedMetal]

No wonder why Python is awesome, they have awesome devs :)

[@PedroTeixeira]

I’ve been using Python for over a decade (informally trained) and haven’t learned so many great tidbits so quickly in a long time. Awesome talk!

[@juliushinze5177]

10:20 Beautiful syntax highlighting

[@jonty3551]

Lol

[@frankieteardrop666]

I remember my prof for C++ and OOP had every other word/letter in his notes/code highlighted with no common theme whatsoever.

[@gromilla1990]

"If you are mutating something while you are iterating over it, you are living in a state of sin and you deserve whatever happens to you" :D loled so hard on this one! 20:20

[@Michael-jq1hl]

Hi I have recently started studying python, what is that arrow in print i,'-->',color?

[@burakozdamar]

​@@Michael-jq1hl it's not a special character or something. he just wanted to print an arrow, that's it. the characters in single or double quotation marks are interpreted as string. so this statement prints 1 --> greens for example.

[@Michael-jq1hl]

@@burakozdamar I see, many thanks, I never found the answer to that and now that I see the quotes makes more sense :)

[@godfather7339]

@@Michael-jq1hl it's been a year, hope you are doing with python.

[@Michael-jq1hl]

@@godfather7339 hey, kind of. I decided that instead of developing I could recruit Python Devs, so that is how I am using the little skill I have acquired. Unfortunately, most Devs think I am like any other recruiter and ignore me xD

[@brotherlui5956]

6 years old but still good advice. Raymond is a great teacher.

[@Artisan_GenZ]

@@kolterdyx 10 years old, your statement of his statement still stands.

[@stijnvandensande3579]

@@Artisan_GenZ almost 11 now

[@Artisan_GenZ]

@@stijnvandensande3579 • and still holds up

[@Achrononmaster]

The ignored() idiom exists in Python 3.4+ but is called suppress(): # NEW WAY in Python 3.4+: from contextlib import suppress with suppress(OSError): os.remove('foo.txt')

[@locanix]

Thanks! I was wondering why I couldn't find it

[@rusca8]

+

[@thatguy1000001]

I literally just watched this a second time for the entertainment value! Raymond Hettinger is hilarious! Not only was watching this a lot of fun, but super-informative and efficient. I'm going to go check out some of his other talks. If I'm gonna learn python, it might as well be from this dude!

[@tdao9741]

And how’s yours python 7 years later?

[@sandeshgowdru8869]

10 years old video, and it is gold.

[@chrstfer2452]

Some minor differences, izip is just zip now i guess

[@merlin2600]

At 44:00, The `with ignored(OSError)` has been renamed to `with suppress(OSError)` and is from the contextlib package.

[@shushens]

Love this guy. I was quite disappointed when it ended. I was so expecting a much much longer video :D

[@ceestimmerman9785]

You could read the "What's New" articles instead: docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/index.html

[@jacobschmidt]

@@ceestimmerman9785 it's not quite the same!

[@guhkunpatata3150]

Where have I been All this time only to find this GEM right now ??? This video is very great and a MUST WATCH for any pythonista

[@toomuchtruth]

"Start open source contributions to project by going in and placing doc strings". This is a brilliant idea! I've wanted to start contributing for so long but didn't feel I have the skills, I'm gonna do this!!!

[@bonbonpony]

Yes, do it. There's a lot of extremely crappy documentation for Python modules :q

[@MrTigerstyle80]

Dude’s kind of a colossal badass. Not even mad at the Casey Kasem vibe at all. He’s a beast.

[@kumarc634]

at 7:22 it should not for i, color in enumerate(colors): print i,'--->',color[i] but for i, color in enumerate(colors): print i,'--->',color may be printing mistake

[@mByyurt]

I was here to write that. Nice catch.

[@a8lg6p]

I was about to make that comment. Either way works the same, but it's exactly what he's been telling us not to do, so clearly a mistake.

[@adelkhafizova]

Also stopped the video to see if someone has pointed this out already)

[@aikimark1955]

Do you think that Raymond is reading these comments?

[@EyeIn_The_Sky]

I think you do have to have the: print(i,'-->', color [i]) otherwise you will just get all the colours beside each index in a row repeated 4 times. Unless this is just in Python 3?

[@richieKostenko]

This is probably the best presented programming video I've ever seen. Thanks!

[@Decessus117]

"There's two kinds of people in the world: people who've mastered dictionaries and total goobers." - Raymond Hettinger

[@dontbetoxic4387]

Isn’t there are correct?

[@77aHeB]

First - this is an awesome piece, I didn't knew Raymond Hettinger was to be blamed for so many iterators in python, and I truthfully love this guy now that I know what he did for most of my days! :) There is a small bug in 15:58 onwards due to the missing tgt variable, but the more important thing is that it can get even more beautiful (IMHO) from: def find(seq, target): for i, value in enumerate(seq): if value == target: break else: return -1 return i to this: def find(seq, target): for i, value in enumerate(seq): if value == target: return i return -1 not that the for/else is not nice in some other cases, this was probably just not the right example for it.

[@matthewwatts9693]

This is a must see video for an python developer. Fantastic!

[@stasbovanenko]

Amazing talk ! Probably best I've heard in all 26 year I'm coding. A handful of smiles and headful of HQ knowledge. Thank you, Raymond !

[@torgeirlaurvik8195]

This video was the video that got me interested in writing ideomatic Python and iterators. I've revisited it now and then ever since 1. year at uni. Amazing lecturer.

[@MrTigerstyle80]

This dude is off the hook smart.

[@Krazness]

this may be the best python video I've seen online

[@bonbonpony]

Yeah, there should be a video like this one for every language out there. One can learn much more about how to write clean code from such videos than from any crappy tutorial.

[@hoanghaipham4318]

What amazing techniques! Why I haven't seen this sooner. Thank you a lots

[@MrCoolnamehuh]

Found this to be one of the most useful python talks thus yet on youtube.

[@anAlokDubey]

I m watching 7 years old video and leaning lots of amazing things.... :-) you are really great.

[@DmitriiGlandarius]

Very nice. In just 50 minutes I learned moe then in the last month.

[@borgonzalezusach9263]

This man is technically brilliant and hilarious. Not something you see everyday. Thanks for the nice speech!!

[@mountainhobo]

Love Raymond's presentation style.

[@michaelfresco2769]

Yes! It's very entertaining.

[@joedempseysr.3376]

I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation! Take the old-fashioned, ugly, slow way of doing things and instead do the new-fangled, beautiful, fast way. I love it!

[@darkopz]

Initially I refuse to believe any developer wouldn’t know what “in” semantically means, but then I’m reminded of all the code I’ve seen.

[@bonbonpony]

Most programmers nowadays have just learnt to parrot other people's code without any actual in-depth understanding of what it does or why is its syntax the way it is. Mostly "thanks to" online tutorials, like those on Udemy or alike where blind lead the blind :q I still have people giving me weird looks when I write C++ code like this: if (a == b) do_something(); else do_something_else(); instead of wrapping the functions into braces, because they think that those braces are part of the syntaxt and have to be there. Or if I write something like this: cout

[@VladimirSanchez]

I can listen to Mr Hettinger all the time!!! Thanks for the presentation and your contributions.

[@snowblindu]

I wish this guy was my teacher

[@hdggoyo7423]

+snowblindu he's cocky and not interesting at all

[@PhilGerb93]

+hd ggoyo pffft, hater. I wish he was my teacher too!

[@jfolz]

+hd ggoyo He added a lot of the cool stuff to Python so he gets to be cocky.

[@hdggoyo7423]

+riDDimann i was just joking, he looks like a cool dude, chill guys

[@AlfredEssa]

He is cocky, but he knows his shit. If you are going to be a hater, prove your chops.

[@mingosutu]

In python you make your video with audience, clapping, laughing and commenting. Python is fantastic.

[@CraigPerry]

Raymond's an entertaining, engaging presenter. Good mix of material here, definitely came away richer for the experience.

[@mpgovinda]

Just one video and learned more things worth years... great tips!

[@miguelvasquez9849]

this is why i love python, the ways to write clean code.

[@jakykong]

He even said I would fight him on this, but haha, oh man, the comparison functions are something I absolutely *miss*, even if I really agree with almost everything else he said and have been writing idiomatic Python for ages. I ran into a real problem the other day where comparisons were a much cleaner solution than the less obvious and potentially much slower multi-pass sorting: Sorting on multiple keys with independent ascending or descending orders. You can sort a plain tuple without any fuss if you don't mind that every key is ascending or every key is descending. But if you want to mix those, you have to do it in multiple passes, starting from the least significant key to the most significant key, and rely on timsort's stability to get the job done -- or, IMO, cleaner -- if this were Python 2, I could have expressed the comparison function with appropriate ascending/descending signs in a simple if/elif/else return 0 chain, and rapidly expressed both the intent and the functional result quickly. Python 3 even provides a conversion utility that creates wrapper objects on the fly to facilitate this need, which is a bizarrely convoluted way to accomplish what simply allowing either key function or comparison function would have.

[@DeMurker]

Great explanations. And even 3 years late still very useful. One thing though, he says that generator expressions make things faster but when I timeit I get this: ~$ python -m timeit "sum(i**2 for i in xrange(10))" 100000 loops, best of 3: 1.74 usec per loop ~$ python -m timeit "sum([i**2 for i in xrange(10)])" 1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.39 usec per loop

[@benburrill]

+DeMurker Not reproducible: I got 2.57 for generator and 2.77 for list. But in any case, as you go beyond a 10 element list, you are going to get increasingly large memory and speed problems.

[@Shaddycls]

The reason beyond containers over generators affects only at memory level: using zip(iterator1, iterator2) produces a single big object which contains the sum of both containers, since when you use a generator, it only produces an element on each iteration, so you will never have the entire sum of both containers in memory, which is an optimization and faster.

[@deidyomega]

Do it again, but xrange(1000000) ;-)

[@VibeWithSingh]

This presentation is simply awesome !! hands down !!

[@yuli3873]

So this man made enumerate()? I love him from now on!

[@JamesSKim]

This lecture is very nice to learn advanced Python programming. After I watched this video, I realize that I have used Python almost like using C. I have used C and C++ as well as Matlab. Hence, I thought that many approaches in Python will be not much different from the conventional languages except specialized keywords. However, I realize that grammars in Python can be different from that in C.

[@SvenSiegmund]

I love the people who make Python! Thanks for this most enlightening talk.

[@wasikhan7741]

are you a python ninja by now?

[@SvenSiegmund]

@@wasikhan7741 I sure am 😏

[@rdoetjes]

I learned a lot! Then again I don't use Py3 because I use Jython which only 2.7 is stable and a compositing suite that has 2.7 also. The problem with functional programming is (and this video proves it) is that you need to know the function names and what to look for. This means actually bothering to read lots of papers and documentation and then you need to remember them. People aren't very good in remembering things especially non-descriptive. So only people who really dedicated in a language will know these things but Python is an awesome language but it's not a core programming language for most. Which is Java, C# or C++ and there you don't have a lot of functional functions. I love C because it has very few keywords, STL is great but I ALWAYS need to to reread who it works. Functionally very powerful but it's even less descriptive than these functions. So now that I know these situations explained by Raymond I will look them back here and read the docs apply them several times and probably by the 7th or 9th time I will remember it. That is until I don't use Python for 2 years again and forgotten all about them :D

[@palpytine]

Many (if not most) FP languages offer some sort of modules or namespaces to handle this exact problem of discovery, it's definitely not an issue with the paradigm in general.

[@espeon91]

Really insightful video. Didn't even notice the time fly by. Already feel better as a Python programmer.

[@matiasherranz86]

After over 10 years as a working professionally with Python, Hettinger can still blow my mind and renew my passion towards the language. Anyone knows if the deck of slides is still available anywhere?

[@youliyav]

Slides: speakerdeck.com/pyconslides/transforming-code-into-beautiful-idiomatic-python-by-raymond-hettinger-1

[@matiasherranz86]

@@youliyav Nice!! Thanks!

[@anubhav9476]

Man even though this is not quite as relevant to me today, I really love his presentation style

[@purplecrayon7281]

I love this man! He should write a book on clean Python code, if he hasn't already.

[@MacroAggressor]

This is great! I have a *much* better understanding of iterators and their purpose now. Thanks, Mr. Hettinger. edit: How did I not know about dictionary comprehensions?!? (21:05) That is AWESOME!!

[@dgh25]

idk, kinda standard stuff in CS

[@mattralston4969]

Thank you for the lecture, sir. I appreciate the review of some critical "dos and don'ts" for beginners.

[@RichardGrigonis]

I'm so glad that he said we should rename For as ForEach. I suggested that online some years ago, and boy did I get lambasted by everybody!

[@derekeden1163]

probably best python video ive ever seen

[@BillTubbs]

There's an error on the slide at 7:13 titled 'Looping over a collection and indices'. Last line should be: print i, '-->', color

[@vanshdeep91]

Bill Tubbs both have the same meaning brother be it color or colors [i]

[@BillTubbs]

Both have the same result but using the color iterator that enumerate creates is 'faster and beautiful' as he points out.

[@jasonstapley6822]

That talk was amazing. Will need to watch this video a few times.

[@eduardoherrera3696]

Thank you so much for this wonderful lecture. I think this insight might be helpful . As a Novice programer I had a few issues understanding how some of core functions in Python worked and what was because the people who taught me where using derived language examples. Phrases like "if you've code an another language....". But I haven't well time passed I learned the hard way later got to this video and inevitably think that things would been a lot easier for me if this lecture was around.

[@Achrononmaster]

izip() in Python2 is zip() in Python3. Also, you can loop over the longer of the lists. So, import itertools colors = ['red','green,'blue','purple']; shapes =['circle,'triangle','square'] for col, shp in zip_longest(colors,shapes): print( col, '--->', shp) >>> red ---> circle green ---> triangle blue ---> square

[@movax20h]

"with ignored(OSError)". So cool. TIL. In Python 3, it is called "with suppress(...)". You can list multiple exception types too.

[@BryanChance]

Amazing talk..more professors like him. :) I'm starting to appreciate Python now. EDIT: Wow

[@eskays9840]

very much required for a beginner like and why would someone dislike this ....

[@bonbonpony]

Maybe they code in C ;)

[@jnuxadrian]

I think that 'return newfunc(*args)' on line 6 must be replaced by 'return saved[args]' at 41:12

[@lucasfcnunes]

yep. infinite loop

[@DanielCallejasSevilla]

@@lucasfcnunes Stack overflow ;-)

[@uthoshantm]

Note that these functional constructs are now in every mainstream language such as C# and Java. So, it's not that Python has a specific capability, but experienced Python programmers do encourage the use functional constructs. This video is an example.

[@sudiptochatterjee]

Thanks a lot for this video. Raymond is an awesome guy.

[@orkoxy]

At 7:26, it should be for i, color in enumerate(colors): print i, '-->', color

[@Michael-jq1hl]

Hi I have recently started studying python, what is that arrow in print i,'-->',color?

[@2adamast]

Michael the arrow is a string

[@nishankbani3257]

Excellent presentation on Python code writing.

[@RiptheJacker]

Really good video. Starts off as a video for python beginners but is insightful for experienced developers as well.

[@MakrandGuravM]

Akhil Gopi u in python development?

[@RiptheJacker]

yes :)

[@MakrandGuravM]

cool

[@SanteeRocks]

This guy is a legend

[@anonvigil628]

This needs updated for Python 3 - I have to go hunting for which of his recommendations are still valid. The video could at least have footnotes that say which still applies in Py3.

[@defined_user]

Such a great video! Many thanks!

[@blenderpanzi]

27:50 I think doing this is so common, there should be a group_by(sequence, keyfunc). You could then call it with group_by(names, len). There should also be an index_by(sequence, keyfunc). These functions would be trivial to implement, but nevertheless they are common and useful enough to be put in some standard lib (collections?).

[@StevenAkinyemi]

I come back to this every few years. 😅

[@fintohaps]

Amazing stuff! Love the functional style entering Python

[@martinborus9531]

This talk is great even after 10 years. Some of the syntax has changed, for example in 2023: at 44:05 the "with ignored" is now from contextlib import suppress with suppress(OSERROR): and the "izip" command is gone, zip now creates a generator.

[@RomanDryndik]

At 41:09 when he explains self-defined defined decorator for LRU cache it has an error. His implementation leads to infinite recursion. Instead of this: def cache(func): saved = {} def newfunc(*args): if args in saved: return newfunc(*args) result = func(*args) saved[args] = result return result return newfunc It should've been: def cache(func): saved = {} def newfunc(*args): if args in saved: return saved[args] result = func(*args) saved[args] = result return result return newfunc

[@TheAnimystro]

Thanks, I was staring at the code confused as to how that could possibly work, because I assumed he was right and I was missing something!

[@mikhaill244]

Also pointed out that something wrong with the code. Ran it, and yes, infinite recursion.

[@dpo357]

I learned a LOT with this video, Kudos Raymond Hettinger 15:52 for/else, I've always wanted this. For a long time now, I've replicated this behavior in Java enclosing the for inside try/catch and throwing a custom exception of the kind 'BrokenLoop', which looks waaay better, despite feeling forced and inappropriate. Huge like.

[@AGT0M]

Thanks for sharing. I'm new to Python, but I wonder if all the presented snippets of code have been tested. For example, at around 16:00 the code would most likely blow up with an undefined error for tgt, as the input argument named different - target, but all-in-all - good stuff.

[@ewerybody]

yeah not many people found that one! 👏

[@AliSattarBarani]

Amazing Slideshow

[@rishabhbohra]

Give this man a Python Salute!

[@johncongerton7046]

Most enlightening talk

[@ireallyhatemakingupnamesfo1758]

Sophomore CS student here, spent a year in Java and C and been trying to learn python. Currently, my brain is melting

[@sanjaykrish8719]

Whoo... I've been coding the wrong way all the years. I think every python programmer should see this.

[@caballerofelipe00]

I didn't read all comments but I fount that in 29:12 there is an error, 'namespace = parser.parse_args([])' should not contain an empty array as argument, that way it doesn't take into consideration CLI arguments.

[@MrWorshipMe]

Whenever you have a break in the for loop, just wrap that loop inside a function and return instead of break. If you want to return something else in case the for loop didn't break, just return after that loop. No need for else on the for. A for loop with a break and an else is not as readable as a function which just returns from the loop and after it.

[@bonbonpony]

Agreed. However it's not always that easy. For example, if you rely on a lot of state variables inside a complex loop: although factoring it into a function would seem as a great thing to have, it would also mean that you would have to find some way to carry on all that complicated context along with it :q

[@MrWorshipMe]

@@bonbonpony This is exactly what classes are for. Encapsulate all that context inside one class, and have that for loop as a private function. Or if that context is shared, have it inside a named tuple and pass it to the function.

[@bonbonpony]

But that's the problem: then you have to PASS it around all the time. And it's not that _all_ of that context is needed _all_ the time. Suppose the loop uses only 50% of it. Then you have to pass the other unneeded 50% of the clutter too. And it will be a mess. (Inb4 you say passing objects is cheap by reference: but it's still a mess.) Classes? No, that's not what classes are for. Classes are not just "big ol' bags for data and functions" (unfortunately, many people think of them that way.) They are means to model real-life objects as new data types, by defining their interfaces. What you meant is more like a _namespace_ or _module_ , but still it doesn't solve the problem - it just moves it somewhere else. Because all that state will now have to be shared between several functions and, as I said, not _every_ function requires _every_ piece of that state at the same time.

[@manojbisht7018]

Documented version gist.github.com/JeffPaine/6213790

[@blabnfriends]

gratzi

[@ciscohdz]

hero, that is you

[@david88va]

I have 0 programming experience and wanting to learn Python. This is obvi completely over my head bc i dont know what any of the words even mean but I dont want to find a random source to learn and learn incorrectly. Is there any recommendations of resources that teach programming from start but without the flaws this speaker teaches?

[@lordtejas9659]

40:26 that one guy is really enjoying it:)

[@AhmedBalfaqih]

I kept smiling. Thank you.

[@isilanes]

24:20, about the use of get() when counting appearances of color within a list. I am probably not saying anything new, but I did some tests and actually using get() is slower than the naïve "if color not in d". More concise, sure, but more efficient... it doesn't seem so. The defaultdict he mentions later is actually quite faster, even including the time to convert the defaultdict back into a regular dict. Of the alternative ways of doing the counting, I sometimes use a fourth one he doesn't mention, and is almost as fast as the defaultdict. The code would go like this: d = {} for color in colors: try: d[color] += 1 except: d[color] = 1 Of course the relative speed of different methods depends on how many different "color" items we have within the list "colors". The try/except method is more efficient the less distinct colors there are (so less except blocks executed).

[@erik7726]

Very good video, helps writing efficient and clean Python!

[@jeddak]

13:45 realizing this was a milestone in my Python journey

[@llewgibson]

Just stumbled across your video mate, really love the content. Liked straight away, We should connect!

[@MrDevZero]

Great. This presentation is awesome. To make it awesomer slides should also be available somewhere.

[@PramodL]

Can't recommend this talk enough. Must watch to take your python chops to the next level.

[@TheGIXL]

41:16 it should be "return saved[args]" instead of "return newfunc(*args)"

[@xybersurfer]

i do .NET, but this was a nice glimpse of Python. there are a lot of similarities. i enjoyed the humor too

[@VoicelessRabbit]

OMG... I have been doing hacks in python for loops trying to do what enumerate does... THANK YOU!!!

[@rusca8]

Man, this is awesome.

[@cygil1]

@14:21 lambda: f.read(32) is a lot clearer to me than "partial(f.read, 32)" since all we're actually doing is suppressing evaluation of f.read until it's called by iter, the equivalent of quoting in lisp. It threw me for a loop because I think of partial as being used for partial evaluation, something to do with the name I think.

[@GraficaObscura]

Wow - amazing talk - informative, concise, immediately useful. Thank you.

[@Alex_Khouri]

Amazing video - thank you so much!