Intro

This is a tiny collection of self-contained, useful, short Python code snippets that are (1) all tested and validated, (2) easy to contribute to, and (3) simple to reuse.

Size Matters

The main aspect here is code size which at the start was a strict limit of ten lines of code because in Python this already allows for solving useful little tasks, and the first chosen project name was “tenliners” (not so funny, agreed). Of course, some code is more useful than some other, hence it makes little sense to count comments or docstrings or empty lines (non-code). In fact, you soon realize you only really care about “effective code”, the one that has the most effect (or value) to solve your task or demonstrate something. And there is very little effect of this in lines with only opening or closing brackets, braces or parentheses which people sometimes write to manually structure data. Same with imports which only enable you to use some modules. What is left is code that really does something when it executes. And this is what we are trying to measure here. Now the number ten is somewhat arbitrary (why not 11?) and it can be hard or impossible to express some interesting things with ten or less lines, even in Python. Therefore the concept of “ten” was stretched a bit into “teen” leading to the name “Pyteen” and a limit of 19 lines of effective code. Let’s see where that goes!

More to come…