I feel elegant techniques/idioms are usually non-OO, because OO code is too verbose to write quickly.
I feel best-practice cookbooks would showcase the most useful idioms.
# I feel perl is the first language to put the “hash” on center stage, as the most versatile apparatus (or “construct”). Ditto in Python. I guess the same data structure is at the heart of py/perl/javascript OO
# list comprehension and generator expressions. Until you start thinking in terms of these constructs, you aren’t truly a python practitioner.
# list processing functions — map() reduce() filter() zip(). I feel these are very popular in real projects.
# decorators