Python Code Golf

This summarizes the process of participating in a code golf session hosted by RaviewUp at PyCon 2018, solving a problem by minimizing character count. Code golf is a competition to implement an algorithm with the shortest possible code, and it has become established as its own play culture, with dedicated sites and books existing just for this purpose.

The problem was to take n diamond sizes as input and draw only the outlines of the diamonds overlapping with *, within a square area sized to max(s), the largest size. If all diamonds had the same size, only one had to be visible, and each line had to be padded with spaces all the way to the right, even after the last *.

The process started with a plain 551-character solution. It created a large blank grid, then calculated the center and quadrant coordinates of each diamond to place the * characters.

After that, code-golf-style optimizations were applied step by step.

• Minimized comments, whitespace, variable names, and indentation, reducing it from 551 characters to 289 characters
• Extracted repeatedly used values into variables and replaced range and * with shorter names, reducing it to 271 characters
• Changed int(n/2) to n//2, and also shortened the blank grid creation using a list comprehension, reducing it to 258 characters
• Combined multiple statements onto a single line, finally reducing it to 237 characters

At the end, there was still room to shrink further, but the point emphasized is that the essence of code golf lies in first solving the problem in the simplest way, and then compressing it to the extreme afterward. It concludes that while this kind of black-magic optimization is hard to use at a company, it's an appealing way to enjoy a conference and a form of play unique to developers.