Introduction

Pythonic Programming — by Dmitry Zinoviev (4 / 116)

👈 Preface | TOC | About the Software 👉

Python is a fantastic programming language. It is concise. It is flexible. It is versatile. It is elegant. It is unbelievably popular, firmly holding its position as the number three language in the world since September 2018, according to TIOBE Index.[2] It comes with a great collection of about 200 modules in the standard library, an unmeasurable pile of third-party modules, and a well-documented extension mechanism. Finally, Python is very efficient, despite being an interpreted language. You just have to follow its spirit.

Every programming language and system has its spirit. The spirit of FORTRAN 66/77 is bulky multidimensional arrays of real numbers, uppercase letters, and a lack of recursion. The spirit of C is pointers and the happy sisters malloc and free. The spirit of Java is pages-long classes and the Java virtual machine. What is the spirit of Python, then?

This book offers almost one hundred tips that explain how to write Pythonic code in the namesake language. It is hard to explain what “Pythonic” means. Just like Zen that I mention in Tip 2, ​Import This​ and elsewhere in the book, “pythonicity” (yes, there is such word!) is an epiphany, an enlightenment that is not learned but experienced. Hopefully, after browsing or reading the book, you will become a more Pythonic programmer — and, therefore, a better Python programmer in general.