Best afterA comparison is a yes/no value

Truthiness: what counts as true

Python lets any value stand in a yes/no test: empty containers, 0, '' and None are 'falsy', everything else 'truthy'. But truthy is not the same as equal to True — and confusing the two skips the branch you wanted.

Set label to 'has items' when the list has something in it, otherwise 'empty'.

Comparing a list to True execution-derived · CPython

3    label = "has items"4else:

variables

state after line 1 runs

variable	value
`items`	`[3,8]`

step 1 / 3

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What you are looking at

Watch which branch runs, and what label ends up as.

Buggy — if items == True: compares the list [3, 8] to the bool True — and a list never equals True, so the test is False and we wrongly land on 'empty'.
Procedural — if items: asks whether the list is truthy. A non-empty list is, so we correctly land on 'has items'.

Every state you see came from running the program under CPython's tracer at build time — see how GlassBox stays honest.