Flattening

Okay, imagine you have a bunch of balls of different sizes and colors. Some are big, some are small, some are red, some are blue, and so on. Now, let's say you want to organize them and make them all the same size and shape so you can stack them neatly in a box. That's what flattening means - making things flat, even, and uniform.

To flatten the balls, you would need to squash them down with something heavy, like a book or a rolling pin. This would make them all the same size and shape, which makes it easier to stack them neatly in a box. Similarly, in computer programming, we use flattening to transform complex data structures into simpler, more uniform ones.

For example, let's say you have a list of lists. Each sublist contains a bunch of information about a different person, like their name, age, and address. But because each person has different information, the sublists might have different lengths and structures. To make it easier to work with this data, we might flatten it into a single list, where each item corresponds to a specific piece of information for each person.

So instead of a list of lists, it would be a single list of tuples (a group of items together, like a bundle): each tuple representing a person and containing all their information in a consistent order. This makes it easier to search, sort, filter or analyze the data.

In summary, when we talk about flattening, we mean transforming complex, uneven or nested data into a simpler, more uniform structure. It's like making a big pile of balls into a neat stack, or turning a messy list of sublists into a tidy list of tuples.