172 Ultimately it probably doesn't have a safe .get method because a dict is an associative collection (values are associated with names) where it is inefficient to check if a key is present (and return its value) without throwing an exception, while it is super trivial to avoid exceptions accessing list elements (as the len method is very fast).

You can use get to talk about the progress that you are making. For example, if you say that you are getting somewhere, you mean that you are making progress, and if you say that something won't get you anywhere, you mean it will not help you to progress at all.

"get" is one of the most common verbs in English, and the many meanings may be confusing for language learners. The following table indicates some of the different constructions found, along with the most common meanings of each:

Here the get method finds a key entry for 'e' and finds its value which is 1. We add this to the other 1 in characters.get (character, 0) + 1 and get 2 as result.

As you have found, get just gets the value corresponding to a given key. sorted will iterate through the iterable it's passed. In this case that iterable is a dict, and iterating through a dict just iterates through its keys. If you want to sort based on the values instead, you need to transform the keys to their corresponding values, and of course the obvious way to do this is with get. To ...