The Evolution of a Python Programmer

Here is the discussion from the last time this was posted (90 Comments):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1087068

If anyone's interested (I am because I found myself to be a 'Lazier programmer') -

Timeit's time for three functions:

Lazy Programmer - 0.907521744301

Lazier Programmer - 1.0473810545812512

Using math.factorial - 0.12187403971609001

I prefer "short but to the point". This is instinctively what I threw in iPython before looking past first snippet:

    print reduce(lambda x, y: x*y, xrange(2, 6+1))

As a newish Python guy (5 months), I'm interested as to why the preferable solution seems to be to import operator and use the multiplication function? (I'm purposely ignoring the more preferable call to the C library)

Two answers, really.

1) The Python community doesn't really like lambdas. It's almost always considered better style to declare a named function, even if it's a short one-liner. If it's already available in the standard library, use that instead of re-implementing it as an unnecessary lambda.

2) This is an adaptation of jokes that have been made about many languages before Python, so the code isn't very Pythonic to start with. Most of the complex ones have errors that prevent them from running, they're just for comedic effect.

If you can live with floating point results:

   from math import gamma
   def factorial(x):
      return gamma(x+1)

This has the advantage of working correctly for non-integer arguments.