Homogenization of scientific computing – Python is eating other languages’ lunch

Re:Homogenization of scientific computing – Python is eating... by Goladus on Thursday January 09, 2014 @08:05PM (#7034392)

I like this one. Though I would do it like this to keep the lines under 80 characters:

    words=open('test.txt').read().lower().split()
    for word, count in Counter(words).most_common():
        print word, count

(edited per child comment)

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Re:Homogenization of scientific computing – Python is eating... by benhoyt on Thursday January 09, 2014 @09:14PM (#7034663)

Yeah, those are nice -- and may actually be more efficient on smaller files, as you're only doing the lower() once on a big string. However, for big files you don't necessarily want to read the whole thing in at once.

One nitpick: it's Pythonic (I think) to just name the list of words "words" rather than "word_list".

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Re:Homogenization of scientific computing – Python is eating... by Goladus on Friday January 10, 2014 @09:29AM (#7036694)

Yes that's a classic tradeoff, a proficient programmer will have to pick one.

Personally I always read entire files into memory first unless I have reason to believe memory will be an issue or need to program defensively against malicious/careless input. The code is always much cleaner and easier to read and if you need to do a second pass on the data you don't need to re-read it from disk.

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