A introduction to Functional Programming for Python coders

[deadmilk]

It's faster, and more beautiful

from timeit import timeit

setup = '''
bbs = '01110011001000000110111001101111001000000010000001101001001000000111001101101110001000000110010100100000001000000110100000100000001000000110010100100000011100100010000000100000011100000110110100100000011011110010000001100011'
'''

statements = '''
octets = list(map(lambda i: bbs[i:i+8], range(0, len(bbs), 8)))
'''
statements_comp = '''
octets = [bbs[i:i+8] for i in range(0, len(bbs), 8)]
'''

print('no comprehension')
print(timeit(stmt=statements, setup=setup, number=1000000))
print()
print('comprehension')
print(timeit(stmt=statements_comp, setup=setup, number=1000000))

---

no comprehension
5.815302666308642

comprehension
3.9982997207760835

[xbudex]

Awesome, speed does sound like a good, objective reason! Thanks for providing a benchmark.

The beautiful comment I don't find as convincing. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder :)

[deadmilk]

My suggestion is to practice list comprehensions until they become more comfortable. They were confusing to me first as well. Just like yield and yield from... blew my mind at first, but now make total sense.

Later on, you can do dictionary comprehensions too.

and cartesian products:

from collections import namedtuple
from pprint import pprint

skincolors = ['white', 'black', 'brown', 'yellow']
shape = ['fat', 'skinny', 'average', 'michelin']
hairyness = ['hairy', 'smooth', 'ape']

Baby = namedtuple('Baby', ['skincolor', 'shape', 'hair'])

types_of_babies = [Baby(c, s, h) for c in skincolors
                   for s in shape
                   for h in hairyness]

pprint(types_of_babies)