Interesting, I'm using this [0] to test and got different results. The Pythonic function is 2% slower on 3.9.1 AMD 4900HS but 17% faster on 3.9.1 E5-2660 v2 VPS

Interesting, I'm using this [0] to test and got different results. The Pythonic function is 2% slower on 3.9.1 AMD 4900HS but 17% faster on 3.9.1 E5-2660 v2 VPS and 6% faster on 3.6.9 i5-3570S bare metal. I personally think either function is fine. The max finding code pattern in the long function should be familiar to most. For the Pythonic function, I don't think it's less obvious enough to matter. You have a list of stuffs and you want to find the max so you wrap it in the max function. Maybe zip(xs, xs[1:]) can take a bit to recognize but I think it's eh. For the Pythonic one, one can also write all_diffs = [x2-x1 for x1, x2 in zip(xs, xs[1:])] return max(all_diffs) Using list is also markedly faster than the Pythonic generator for me, which is to be expected: ~16% faster than both. [0] https://gist.github.com/squaresmile/8dd08898851a4e19359cdb30e0f7b843 https://gist.github.com/squaresmile/8dd08898851a4e19359cdb30...