In this article the author introduces the built-in any.
However, this isn't really a “tutorial on how to use any”; instead, Eric shares his experience with using any and reflects on the fact that apparently he is never able to use it when first implementing something.
Eric only thinks of using it on a refactoring pass.
I liked this write-up because it's a very candid demonstration of what Eric considers to be a suboptimal behaviour of his, and then gets us to think about the simple things, like any, that are not so simple if you think about the big picture.
For example, to use any in the real world you will hardly ever be given a list of Boolean values to which you can apply any.
In the context of making a decision based on whether any item in a collection satisfies a given predicate, you have to learn to recognise the pattern:
any(predicate(element) for element in iterable)This line of code answers the question “does any element of the given iterable satisfy my predicate?”.