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No offense taken.

I said I like to write it this way, not that I always do it.

> why code like that

It's a fun exercise.

> it would be a huge waste of time and energy

I don't fully agree on this: from the name and signature it's pretty clear what the function does, so you don't need to waste time "parsing" the details. And with unit tests it is also very low-risk.

But that's speculative, in a real project I'd just use lodash.

In production code, if I ever have clever one-liners, they're usually offset with just as many additional lines of comments to explain what it's doing and why it works. Plus, this function is generic and would probably be extracted into a utility module, anyway.

To your point, though, this one is pretty esoteric.

the trend of style over readability. google recommends avoiding list comprehensions in python yet 99% of stackoverflow python questions have some convoluted list comprehension answer