Which One Do I Reach For?

An interactive explainer for Python lists vs. dictionaries vs. tuples, built around real day-to-day analytical work.

Inspired by the animated, "watch-it-happen" style of tidyexplain, reframed for the decision a learner actually faces: which container do I reach for, and why?

Built from the Stringfest Analytics handout "Python 1: Which One Do I Reach For?"

What's inside

One small watchlist, held three different ways:

• "What do you catch yourself thinking?" Click the thought that sounds like you and get the recommended container, the reasoning, and a code snippet.
• The big three, animated:
  • List (['NVDA', 'AAPL', 'MSFT', 'AMZN', 'TSLA']): add a ticker, sort A to Z (the cells physically slide into their new positions), remove the last item, grab one by position.
  • Dictionary ({'AAPL': 225, ...}): click any ticker to look up its price and watch the key-to-value pair light up. Click the missing key to see a KeyError. JSON is just a dictionary.
  • Tuple (('USD', 'EUR', 0.92)): try to change it and get a TypeError plus a lock; unpack it into named values.
• Decisions at a glance: the cheat sheet, clickable.

Running it

It's a static site. No build step, no dependencies.

# from the project root
python -m http.server 4173
# then open http://localhost:4173

Or just open index.html directly in a browser.

Deploying to GitHub Pages

Push to main and enable Pages (Settings, then Pages, deploy from branch, root). The site is served as-is.

Files

File	Purpose
index.html	Page structure and content
css/styles.css	Stringfest-branded styling (red #CF3338 + off-white #EEECE1)
js/data.js	Sample watchlist data and decision-engine content
js/app.js	Interactions and animations (vanilla JS, no dependencies)
assets/	Stringfest logo (dark + white variants)

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