Well it is what it is. I used to be hostile to the 79-character limit until I realized that on my widescreen laptop, I could fit two code buffers side-by-side with no wrap or truncation if I did the 79-char limit. Since then I've been converting a lot of code. Here's a couple of tips that have helped me keep the code under 80 characters and not too ugly: Use triple-quoted strings if whitespace doesn't matter (e.g. HTML strings or SQL queries). Define long strings like error messages somewhere else (an include file, as static class members, whatever makes sense). If you've got a long function call or collection that's going to need to be broken up, break after the opening paren/brace/bracket. According to my linter (if not PEP8), you only need to indent 4 spaces if you break after the opening delimter. Otherwise you indent all the way up to the first value. For example: instead of this: some_object.long_method_name("fizz", "buzz", "fozz", "bizz", "quux", 1, "lemon", "spam") this: some_object.long_method_name( "fizz", "buzz", "fozz", "bizz", "quux", 1, "lemon", "spam" ) or even this: some_object.long_method_name( "fizz", "buzz", "fozz", "bizz", "quux", 1, "lemon", "spam" ) I don't know that I've ever gotten to the point of consulting a thesaurus to make my comments shorter; are you dealing with some deeply nested comments? EDIT: can't get the code to line up right on reddit, but you get the idea. More on reddit.com

As others have mentioned, min will be quicker. min just has to walk through the list once, whereas sort must do more compares, making it more complex.

However, one case you might want to use sort is when you need more than just the minimum. Eg. you want the 5 smallest items, not just the smallest. Here "sorted(mylist)[:5]" will do the job, but another option to keep in mind is the heapq module, as "heapq.nsmallest(5, mylist)" will often perform better than sort, at least for a small number of items.

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Take the derivative and find where it equals zero. Also, do your calculus homework using calculus! But seriously - give us more context. You really can use numpy/scipy to get a derivative, or you can scan the function with some arbitrary input, or you can ask questions we can't answer without proper setup. WHY are you trying to find a local maxima? What inputs do you have? What context is this in? More on reddit.com

Generally, I don't care about the line count of a module. I group my classes / functions in a way that seems natural. Some modules are only 50 lines long. Others reach the 1000. After all, what difference does pure line count make once it's beyond "more than a couple of screens full"? More on reddit.com