Why You Should Stop Using List Comprehensions in Python

Ok, the title admittedly is a little clickbait; you shouldn’t completely stop using list comprehensions in Python. List comprehensions are very commonly used and are a very Pythonic way to perform a wide range of tasks. Especially in simple applications, they’re definitely better than (for example) appending a list of values to a new list with a for loop. However, when you’re working with large datasets at scale, list comprehensions can become memory hogs and slow down your workflow (or make it crash entirely). Fortunately, there’s a memory-efficient alternative to list comprehensions we can use to avoid this problem. In this piece, we’ll go through generator expressions and how you can use them as an alternative to list comprehensions to optimize your code. Let’s dive in! <h1>A simple comparison of list vs generator expressions</h1> You’re probably familiar with list comprehensions already, but let’s run through a quick example of creating a list of squared numbers from 1 to 10. <pre> squares = [i**2 for i in range(1, 11)] print(squares)</pre> All the above code does is take use the exponent operator to calculate the square of every number in the range 1 to 11 (so from integer numbers 1 to 10) and return them in a list. <a href="https://python.plainenglish.io/why-you-should-stop-using-list-comprehensions-in-python-a6f96f0f6cbd">Visit Now</a>