Book Image

Functional Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming, 3rd edition - Third Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Not enough developers understand the benefits of functional programming, or even what it is. Author Steven Lott demystifies the approach, teaching you how to improve the way you code in Python and make gains in memory use and performance. If you’re a leetcoder preparing for coding interviews, this book is for you. Starting from the fundamentals, this book shows you how to apply functional thinking and techniques in a range of scenarios, with Python 3.10+ examples focused on mathematical and statistical algorithms, data cleaning, and exploratory data analysis. You'll learn how to use generator expressions, list comprehensions, and decorators to your advantage. You don't have to abandon object-oriented design completely, though – you'll also see how Python's native object orientation is used in conjunction with functional programming techniques. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed in the essential functional programming features of Python and understand why and when functional thinking helps. You'll also have all the tools you need to pursue any additional functional topics that are not part of the Python language.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Preface
16
Other Books You Might Enjoy
17
Index

9.3 Performance improvements

A key feature of any big data algorithm is locating a way to execute some kind of a divide-and-conquer strategy. This is true of functional programming design as well as imperative design.

Here are three options to speed up this processing:

  • We can try to use parallelism to do more of the calculations concurrently. On a four-core processor, the time can be cut to approximately 25 percent. This reduces the time to 8 minutes for Manhattan distances.

  • We can see if caching intermediate results will reduce the amount of redundant calculation. The question arises of how many colors are the same and how many colors are unique.

  • We can look for a radical change in the algorithm.

We’ll combine the last two points by computing all the possible comparisons between source colors and target colors. In this case, as in many other contexts, we can easily enumerate the entire mapping of pixels and colors. If colors are repeated, we avoid doing redundant calculations...