Engineering #16: a quiz on 'falsy', and true/false syntax

Guitarist (Vasily Tropinin, 1823)

Launch School Python Basics, conditionals exercise 1:

Without looking at your notes or the official documentation, try to recall all values that count as falsy in Python.

Oh boy. And if you’re a software engineer and know Python: can you recall all?

After three minutes I had this:

None
0
Fаlse
negative something? no...
negative absolute value? is that a thing?
emptiness that isn't 'None'?

Answer:

False
None
0, 0.0, 0j, and other numeric zero-values
'' (an empty string)
[] (an empty list)
{} (an empty dictionary)
() (an empty tuple)
set() (an empty set)
frozenset() (an empty frozen set)
range(0) (an empty range)

I’ll give myself a 3.5 out of 9.

---

0 is falsy, 1 is true-y. And the shortest way to write the following if statement isn’t this:

import random
random_number = random.randint(0, 1)

if random_number == 1:
    print('Yes!')
else:
    print('No.')

You don’t need the “ == 1 “. This is correct:

if random_number:
    print('Yes!')
else:
    print('No.')

True is the “default” state, so we do not need to specify under which conditions something is True.

This syntax, even on the fourth look at it, I don’t completely like; I know I’m a super-beginner, etc.

This randint randomizes between the integers 0 and 1. We give that value to a variable. If it’s 0, then “if random_number” is False, and we process “else”.

But that kind of makes it look like there is no random_number variable at all any more (though it exists, with the value 0).

(But this is a programming language, not English; you can’t complain too much.)