This talk will cover three major topics: generators, duck typing, and branchless conditionals. We devote roughly the same time for each topic.

First, we cover generators. We start by introducing the keyword yield as a “temporary return” and then see a couple of examples of generators, making clear the contrast between lazy and eager looping techniques.
We explain how generators have the potential to save time and computational resources and we also present generator expressions, as those will be important in the end.

Then, we talk about duck typing in Python and show examples of duck typing in our daily lives through an example inspired in biology and taxonomy. We also show how duck typing is present in standard Python code, for example when we think about the idea of iterable, to show it's not a weird concept that no one uses in practice.

When talking about duck typing we also make the connection to protocols and typing.Protocol, but this section is not focused on code since the main goal is to make sure everyone understands the idea behind duck typing.

Finally, we understand what a branchless conditional is, we see some examples of what branchless conditionals could look like in Python, and we try to understand whether the gain you get by writing less code outweighs the potential readability issues you may or may not have.

This is all done by using an example implementation of a text processing function and then refactoring it by using branchless conditionals.

In the end, we put all three concepts together in a single line of code to create a Python idiom. We use this piece of code to think about what it means to write “good” or “elegant” code and how to achieve it.