How does the performance of an algorithm hold up when you put it into a realistic context? Where might Python code defy Big O notation expectations when using a profiler? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects.

Christopher shares an article about why real-world performance often defies Big O expectations. The piece starts with a task coded in Go and then optimized from O(n²) to O(n). Can an interpreted language like Python compete with a compiled language? Profiling the performance of both versions provides some interesting results.

We also share several other articles and projects from the Python community, including a news roundup, the fastest way to detect a vowel in a string, whether Python dictionaries are ordered data structures, an overview of Python’s enum module, a Python client library for Google Data Commons, and a project to convert plain ASCII to “smart” punctuation.

Course Spotlight: Building Enumerations With Python’s enum

In this video course, you’ll discover the art of creating and using enumerations of logically connected constants in Python. To accomplish this, you’ll explore the Enum class and other associated tools and types from the enum module in the Python standard library.

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