Are Tuples More Like Lists or Strings? And Why We Don't Really Care • [Club]
This post is not about tuples.
This post is not about tuples. It’s not about lists or strings, either. It’s about Python, about its philosophy when dealing with data types, about how you should think about data types when coding in Python.
Tuples are usually introduced to Python learners after lists and strings. They’re almost always described as “like lists, but a bit different”.
And that’s not a bad thing. I say similar things when I introduce tuples to students. But then, fast-forward a few levels of proficiency, and I’m having different discussions with students. Are tuples like lists? Are they like strings? But the point is that those questions don’t really make sense. Other questions matter a lot more in Python. Let’s explore.
This is the first post in The Club, so allow me a word or three before getting back to tuples. I sent out an email last week about the new chapter in The Python Coding Stack. Paid subscribers are now members of The Club. I’ll write more frequent, shorter posts for The Club, sometimes accompanied by short videos (videos will complement the text, they won’t replace it). And all the other stuff: forum, Q&As, code reviews, and more.
I recall when I first started The Python Coding Stack, I agonised over what the first article should be about. It’s the first. It should be special. But then I just published about whatever topic I was thinking about at the time.
I took the same route when writing the first post on The Club – this one. And I’ll do this every week. I’ll write about whatever comes up in my coding, in my teaching, whatever I think you’ll find interesting. Or send me your questions, and they may inspire me to write about them. Don’t be shy.
Now back to tuples.
A long time ago, on a social media platform (now) far, far away, I wrote a series of threads exploring real-world objects from the perspective of Python data types. I recall one of them was about a row of houses. Would a dictionary, or a list, or a tuple, or something else be the “ideal data structure” if I wanted to represent this row of houses as a data type? But there was another question I needed to ask first.