Performance anti-patterns

These anti-patterns lead to inefficiencies that can degrade performance, especially noticeable in large-scale applications or data-intensive tasks. We will focus on the following such anti-patterns:

• Not using .join() to concatenate strings in a loop
• Using global variables for caching

Let’s start.

Not using .join() to concatenate strings in a loop

Concatenating strings with + or += in a loop creates a new string object each time, which is inefficient. The best solution is to use the .join() method on strings, which is designed for efficiency when concatenating strings from a sequence or iterable.

Let’s create a concatenate() function where we use += for concatenating items from a list of strings, as follows:

def concatenate(string_list):
    result = ""
    for item in string_list:
        result += item
   &...