The Pythonic Emptiness - by Abhinav Upadhyay

How do you check a list for emptiness in Python? This simple question often sparks considerable debate, as I discovered firsthand.

Many Python programmers use the len() built-in function for this task, but a large population leverages the truthiness value of sequence type objects to achieve this more succinctly. The latter style is also recommended as part of PEP-8, and considered more Pythonic.

Apart from being Pythonic, this style also offers much better performance—an important factor for such a frequent operation:

Despite its merits, some programmers find this style ambiguous and less readable. I argue that this perceived ambiguity often stems from poor coding style and inadequate engineering practices, rather than the idiom itself. These underlying issues need to be addressed instead of simply covering them with inappropriate solutions.

In this article, I am going to give a few arguments in support of the Pythonic way of doing emptiness checks, and show that the apparent ambiguity usually reflects broader code quality issues rather than the check itself.

Leave a Comment