title: Pythonic way to get the largest item in a list
body: <p>Is there a better way of doing this? I don't really need the list to be sorted, just scanning through to get the item with the greatest specified attribute. I care most about readability but sorting a whole list to get one item seems a bit wasteful.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import operator
  &gt;&gt;&gt; 
  &gt;&gt;&gt; a_list = [('Tom', 23), ('Dick', 45), ('Harry', 33)]
  &gt;&gt;&gt; sorted(a_list, key=operator.itemgetter(1), reverse=True)[0]
  ('Dick', 45)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I could do it quite verbosely...</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; age = 0
  &gt;&gt;&gt; oldest = None
  &gt;&gt;&gt; for person in a_list:
  ...     if person[1] &gt; age:
  ...             age = person[1]
  ...             oldest = person
  ... 
  &gt;&gt;&gt; oldest
  ('Dick', 45)
  </code></pre>