DRY

DRY - DON'T REPEAT YOURSELF

Im going to explain this concept with an example

Suppose you have a list of numbers:

number_list = list(range(1,100)) #generating a list of numbers from 1 to 99

You need to obtain the 2nd, 3nd, 4th power of the numbers in number_list list and print the results or stores the result in another list. You can approach this problem in 2 different ways:

The first way involves writing separate functions to calculate the respective powers as such:

def power2(number_list):
    new_number_list = []
    for num in number_list:
        new_number_list.append(num**2)
    return new_number_list

def power3(num):
    new_number_list = []
    for num in number_list:
        new_number_list.append(num**3)
    return new_number_list

def power4(num):
    new_number_list = []
    for num in number_list:
        new_number_list.append(num**4)
    return new_number_list


number_list = list(range(1, 100))

print(power2(number_list))
print(power3(number_list))
print(power4(number_list))

As you can clearly see, this isn't a very efficient way of coding, the function power2, power3 and power4 have the exact same lines of code and perform essentially the same operation (REPETITION)

A better way to solve this problem would be write a single function that takes 2 parameters:

1. the original list
2. the power you want to raise the the numbers in the list to

so in code it looks like this:

def power(number_list, pow):
    new_number_list = []
    for num in number_list:
        new_number_list.append(num**pow)
    return new_number_list




number_list = list(range(1, 100))

print(power(number_list, 2))
print(power(number_list, 3))
print(power(number_list, 4))

This solves 2 problems:

1. You are not repeating code any more. your code is DRY
2. Your function is now generic, it can now find the nth power of a number