Matthew Mayo Unveils 10 Python One-Liners for Faster, Cleaner Code
Updated
Updated · KDnuggets · Oct 1
Matthew Mayo Unveils 10 Python One-Liners for Faster, Cleaner Code
1 articles · Updated · KDnuggets · Oct 1
Summary
10 practical Python one-liners are presented as replacements for common multi-line patterns, aimed at making code shorter, clearer and often faster.
Several examples hinge on version-specific features: dictionary union needs Python 3.9+, the walrus operator 3.8+, itertools.batched 3.12+, while order-preserving deduplication relies on Python 3.7 behavior.
The list spans routine tasks such as removing duplicates, flattening nested lists, transposing matrices and finding a dictionary's highest-value key with built-in tools like dict.fromkeys, chain.from_iterable, zip and max.
Performance gains are a recurring theme, with any() short-circuiting scans, functools.cache avoiding repeated computation, Counter.most_common replacing manual counting, and batched simplifying fixed-size chunking for workloads like API calls.