k_minima in Python

I am really excited about the Real World Haskell book that is coming out soon. I went through the slides from Bryan O'Sullivan's presentation. He describes implementing k_minima in Haskell. I wanted to give a go at implementing his Haskellish k_minima in Python using itertools. Here is what I came up with.

#! /usr/bin/env python

from itertools import *

DEBUG = False

def debug(*msgs):
    if DEBUG: print 'DEBUG:', msgs

def take(k, elements):
    """
    Extracts the first k elements from a list
    """
    if k > 0:
        for index, element in izip(count(), elements):
            debug('take', index, element)
            yield element
            if index == k - 1: break

def sort(elements):
    """
    Sorts a list
    """
    remaining = elements[:]
    while remaining:
        minimum = min(remaining)
        remaining.remove(minimum)
        debug('sort', minimum, remaining)
        yield minimum

def k_minima(k, elements):
    """
    Find the k least elements in a list
    """
    for element in take(k, sort(elements)):
        yield element

def main(k, elements):
    debug('main', k, elements)
    print list(k_minima(k, elements))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    if len(sys.argv) > 2:
        elements = [int(arg) for arg in sys.argv[1:]]
        main(elements[0], elements[1:])
    else:
        print 'Useage: k_minima.py k element [element] ...'

Here is an example of running the program.

py$ ./k_minima.py 12 42 37 42 11 599 33 499 44 499 488 499 499 488347 448 4 588 7 85 48 59 84 
[4, 7, 11, 33, 37, 42, 42, 44, 48, 59, 84, 85]
py$