My Wild Adventure from Clueless to Confident
Once upon a time, in the early days of my Python programming journey, I found myself struggling with what seemed like a trivial concept: list comprehensions. I had been learning Python for a few months, making decent progress, and starting to feel somewhat confident in my skills. Little did I know that my overconfidence would be my downfall when it came to list comprehensions.
The Struggle Begins
It all started when I stumbled upon a line of code that looked like an alien language to me. I had just begun exploring data science and was working on a simple data manipulation task. The code snippet I encountered was:
squared_numbers = [x**2 for x in range(10)]To my inexperienced eyes, it was as if someone had taken a list and a loop, thrown them in a blender, and hit puree. I could make out the basic ingredients, but I couldn’t understand the smoothie that came out.
I decided to try and dissect the code, attempting to break it down into its most basic components. My first guess was that it was some kind of shorthand for a loop, but my initial attempts to recreate the result using a traditional for loop were comically disastrous. I ended up…
