Print a word, one character per line, backwards
Looking at the two implementations side by side, ignoring the goal of the exercise and alternative implementations, I'd say the second example is better:

It uses one fewer variables.
It does a simple index lookup rather than a slice.
The implementation is easier to follow.

For simple problems like this it's often useful to think of the complexity of the solution as the number of &quot;tokens&quot;, or distinct language elements, necessary to write it down. For example, print(cont2) is four tokens: print, (, cont2 and ). By a quick read the first example has about twice as many tokens as the second.