A Beginner’s Guide to Python List Comprehensions

Eliminate 90% of your for loops

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Every programming language has its own strengths and features. One of the most iconic features of Python are list comprehensions. Comprehensions are fast, easy to read, and able to be used by beginners through experts.

List comprehensions are a shorthand technique for creating a new list that allows both for loops and if statements to control the contents of the newly created list.

Benefits of Comprehensions

There are three primary benefits of using list comprehensions in Python.

1. Simplicity: List comprehensions eliminate for loops, making your code easier to read. Other languages such as JavaScript use array methods named .map() and .filter() to achieve the same results, but these techniques are more confusing for beginners.
2. Speed: List comprehensions are even faster than the for loops that they are replacing. If you want to refactor some of your code for performance, replacing loops with comprehensions is low-hanging fruit.
3. Functional Programming Principles: This isn’t as important for beginners, but functional programming is a conceptual framework where mutable data is not changed. Since list comprehensions create a new list and leave…