Python prides itself on being a newbie-friendly language; its developers
have gone out of their way to try to ensure that easy tasks are
straightforward to program. A recent discussion on the python-ideas
mailing list looked at a use case that is common, but often implemented in an
inefficient, incorrect fashion, with an eye toward making it easier to do
correctly. Finding the first match for a regular expression in a body of
text is where the conversation started, but it went in some other
interesting directions as well.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Python first()