ikr its pretty readable

I thought it returns False if the array is empty

it defaults to 0 when you would think it's 'null'

Would still consider this a pretty obvious and readable Python solution, not a "clever hack" and not in any way terrible.

I haven't been here for a while, but the point was exactly some clever code at least back then. I wonder if that shifted, or simply new people came.

This is clever, but terrible practice and I hope I never have to debug your code. No offense, but making code like this is terrible. The point isn't to make it all in a few lines, instead this makes it harder for everyone else and even yourself.

if there wasn't a while-loop, then this would be the best practice