As we move toward languages with big standard libraries, productivity becomes more and more about knowing what you don't have to do yourself.
Case in point - even as a Python veteran, I've never seen/used collections.Counter before. It'll save me from writing the same stupid three lines over and over, and is probably implemented faster than I naively do. I'd say that this will improve my productivity.
Could not agree with you more. The more advanced I become with a language, the more I like to go back to even basic docs and read the small-print fancy uses for built-ins. This article touches on a number of them, and it's tricks like this that help you write better code (when used responsibly, of course).
The biggest problem is having to use old LTS distros in production that only have python 2.6 for example. I'm glad that most LTS versions are soon to be using python 2.7.
I know 2.7 has been around for a long time, but so much production software is running on RHEL/Centos systems with 2.6.
You can find python26 in EPEL [1] or follow this guide [2] to setup 2.7. This will install 2.6 or 2.7 in parallel, do not set these by default as it will break yum.
Case in point - even as a Python veteran, I've never seen/used collections.Counter before. It'll save me from writing the same stupid three lines over and over, and is probably implemented faster than I naively do. I'd say that this will improve my productivity.