Question

I have always seen in python articles/books that python is simple and it has only one way of doing things. I would like someone to explain to me this concept keeping in mind the example below, if I wanted to get the min and max values of sequence I would do the following;

seq=[1,2,3,4,5,6]

min(seq) #1

max(seq) #6

but I can also do this;

seq[:1]  #1

seq[-1]  #6

surely this are two ways of doing one simple thing. This confuses me a bit.

Answer 1

Not that it “has one way of doing things” as more “There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.” (from Zen of Python).

This doesn’t exclude possibility of having more than one way of doing things. We’re talking about programming where creativity is one of the most important skills and finding new ways of solving problems is a must.

In your example you’re doing two different things:

1. getting minimum and maximum of the list
2. getting first and the last element of the list

it happens that in this particular case result is exactly the same.