Take advantage of caching and the lru_cache decorator to relieve your Python functions from repetitive heavy lifting.

Python lets you set default values for function arguments, which is super convenient. But when those default values are mutable (like lists or dictionaries), you're walking into a sneaky bug trap.

In Python, you can define functions with optional arguments — that is, arguments that you don’t need to state explicitly afterwards — by providing a default value.

Python 3.11 will bear the fruits of CPython's multi-year effort to make Python a faster programming language.

In Python, the mere act of making a function call incurs a relatively large amount of overhead. If some function is called repeatedly in a tight loop, even if it isn’t a long-running function ...

Ubuntu is a free computer system, like Windows or macOS, but it’s built by a community. It’s great for programmers because it’s very flexible and has lots of tools already built-in that help you code.

Positron is Posit's new, free IDE for data science. Users can work with Python and R. It explicitly does not replace RStudio.

I’ve been hacking on that PD stack, and now I’m slowly reformatting it from a bundle of functions into object-based code – Python makes that a breeze. Remember the Sony Vaio board?

This article is adapted from an edition of our Off the Charts newsletter originally published in October 2021. Off the Charts is a weekly, subscriber-only guide to The Economist’ s award-winning ...