But the first example does the same thing for an empty list. I guess the lesson is that if you’re measuring the speed of arbitrary stylistic syntax choices, maybe Python isn’t the best language for you.

Could also compare against:

if not len(mylist)

That way this version isn’t evaluating two functions. The bool evaluation of an integer is false when zero, otherwise true.

The bees were just lazy and couldn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The survivors will surely be stronger.

There’s probably a lot that could be recovered from my urine. Fun fact when phosphorus was first discovered they had to boil off gallons of urine to get a useful amount, so they collected barrels of urine from mining camps.

MIT OpenCourseWare might be close enough to what you’re looking for.

https://ocw.mit.edu/

And accompanying lectures on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT