When reading Practice of programming by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike I came across this advice:
As a rule, try to handle irregularities and exceptions and special cases in data. Code is harder to get right so the control flow should be as simple and regular as possible.
I came across a piece of code I could apply it today!
Instead of this:
required_days_list = []
# ...lots of code where we append stuff in the list...
# in a senario where no products in database has delay, we can't apply max on empty arg
if len(required_days_list) == 0:
return 0
return max(required_days_list)You could do this:
required_days_list = [0]
# ...lots of code where we append stuff in the list...
return max(required_days_list)Shorter and nicer don't you think?