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4 Essential Python Tips for 2024

With the new year just starting, why not sharpen your Python knowledge by refreshing these 4 useful Python skills?

1. Let’s start with a fundamental one in Python. List Comprehensions! These can make your code more readable and save a lot of space. Here is an easy example with a simple square function.

# function = []
# for x in range(10):
#   function.append(x**2)

squares = [x**2 for x in range(10)]

2. Decorators can be used for timing or other functionality! Here we use a timer function to run our original function while also timing it. These decorator functions can be used for a lot of things but are mainly used with repeated tasks. Example use cases: logging information, writing data, reading data, and timing functions.

import time

def timer(func):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        start = time.time()
        result = func(*args, **kwargs)
        end = time.time()
        print(end - start, end="s")
    return wrapper

@timer
def add(x, y):
    return x + y

3. Enumerate in for-loops. Using the enumerate function in a Python for-loop gives you more flexibility to get both the index and item from the list that you loop over. This makes your code a lot more readable than using, for example, fruits.index(fruit) to get the index of an item.

fruits = ['apple', 'banana', 'orange', 'grape']

# Using enumerate to loop over the elements with their index
for index, fruit in enumerate(fruits):
    print(f"Index {index}: {fruit}")

4. The last one is multithreading using the built-in library threading in Python. Using threading allows you to run two or more functions at the same time on the processor. This has a lot of use cases, especially in UI programs running Tkinter where multiple loops are running at the same time.

import threading
import time

def print_numbers():
    for i in range(5):
        time.sleep(1)  # Simulate some work
        print(f"Print Numbers: {i}")

def print_letters():
    for char in 'ABCDE':
        time.sleep(1)  # Simulate some work
        print(f"Print Letters: {char}")

# Create two threads
thread_numbers = threading.Thread(target=print_numbers)
thread_letters = threading.Thread(target=print_letters)

# Start the threads
thread_numbers.start()
thread_letters.start()

# Wait for both threads to finish
thread_numbers.join()
thread_letters.join()

print("Both threads have finished.")

Thank you for reading through my article and I hope that you have learned something new and that this year becomes a great one!