the more I code the more I understand the pythonic way of coding ,

I see. Thank you for clarifying. I've never used Python 2, so I wouldn't know. Haha!

This solution is for Python 2, and that's been already mentioned 7 years ago by runzhi214 and frankturnerv.

In other programming languages, like JavaScript, it returns a returns a new array from an original array based instructions you give it. It works similarly in Python, only the list isn't return. It iterates through a list and applies changes you've specified using a function to each element in the list, or multiple lists. I hope this helps some.

here are few examples to simplify it:
map(int, a) --> apply int to every list object in list a to make them integers
map(str, a) --> apply str to every list object in list a to make them strings

a good summary of a confusing line of code!

I don't get the joke...

That's a twoliner though.

nice