Blog Post #113: What Does it Mean to Write “Pythonic” Code?

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Welcome to Part 5 of our series: The Pythonic Way! In the first four parts, we’ve focused on the syntax and rules of the Python language—the fundamentals that make our code work. Now, we’re going to shift our focus from code that simply works to code that is beautiful, elegant, and idiomatic.

In this post, we’ll explore the philosophy behind writing “Pythonic” code and introduce the official guiding principles of the language: The Zen of Python.

Beyond Just Working Code

You will often hear Python developers talk about whether a piece of code is “Pythonic.” This isn’t about whether the code runs without errors; it’s a question of style and philosophy.

Pythonic code is code that leverages the built-in features and idioms of the language to create solutions that are simple, readable, and elegant.

It’s the difference between speaking a foreign language by translating each word literally from your native tongue, versus speaking it fluently like a native, using its natural phrases and expressions. Pythonic code feels natural to an experienced Python programmer.

An Example: The “Pythonic” Difference

Let’s look at a concrete example. In many older languages (like C), the standard way to loop through a collection of items involves manually creating and managing an index variable. We could write a Python loop in that style:

# A non-Pythonic, "C-style" loop
my_list = ["a", "b", "c"]
index = 0
while index < len(my_list):
    item = my_list[index]
    print(item)
    index += 1

This works, but it’s not Pythonic. It’s verbose, requires manual bookkeeping (index = 0, index += 1), and is more prone to off-by-one errors. The Pythonic way is to iterate directly over the items, as we learned in Post #34:

# The Pythonic way
my_list = ["a", "b", "c"]
for item in my_list:
    print(item)

This version is simpler, more readable, and directly expresses our intent: “for each item in this list, do something.” It lets the for loop handle the complex mechanics of iteration behind the scenes. This is a core example of the Pythonic philosophy in action.

The Zen of Python

This philosophy isn’t just an informal agreement among developers; it’s baked into the language itself. You can see it by opening a Python interpreter and running a special command:

import this

Running this will display “The Zen of Python,” a collection of 19 guiding principles for writing good code, written by a long-time Python developer, Tim Peters.

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

While all are insightful, a few principles stand out for beginners:

  • Beautiful is better than ugly: Python values clean, elegant code over convoluted code.
  • Simple is better than complex: If there are two ways to solve a problem, the simpler one is usually the right one.
  • Readability counts: This is perhaps the most important principle. Code is written for humans to read first, and for computers to execute second.

What’s Next?

Writing Pythonic code is a journey. It’s about developing an intuition for the language and learning to choose the most direct and readable solution to a problem. The Zen of Python serves as your guide on this journey.

Over the next series of posts, we will explore specific, practical examples of Pythonic code. We’ll start by taking a deeper look at the very example we used today. In Post #114, we will formalize why the for item in sequence loop is the Pythonic way to iterate.

Author

Debjeet Bhowmik

Experienced Cloud & DevOps Engineer with hands-on experience in AWS, GCP, Terraform, Ansible, ELK, Docker, Git, GitLab, Python, PowerShell, Shell, and theoretical knowledge on Azure, Kubernetes & Jenkins. In my free time, I write blogs on ckdbtech.com

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