You did, but it might not be an effective strategy to mention asymptotic complexity to help forward your argument that one linear implementation is faster than another.

Whether it's a win in Python to use one or two loops isn't so clear, as a lot is hidden behind complex opcodes and opaque iterator implementations. Imperative testing might help, but a new interpreter version could change your results.

In any case, if we want to nitpick over performance we should be insisting on a parallel implementation to take advantage of the gobs of cores CPUs now have, but now we're on a micro-optimisation crusade and are ignoring the whole point of the article.