“First make it work, then make it right, and, finally, make it fast.”
—Stephen C. Johnson and Brian W. Kernighan in“The C Language and Models for Systems Programming,” Byte magazine (August 1983)
When we learn to program in a new language, we write very small programs at first. In Python, small programs are tiny; tasks like searching a text file, shrinking a digital image, or creating a diagram can be completed with ten lines of code or less. At the beginning of a programmer’s learning path, each of these lines is hard work: learning simple things such as appending a value to a list or cutting a ...
