Make this implementation of counting sort Pythonic
My two cents:

You can get rid of def find_min(a_list): and def find_max(a_list):. Instead, use python's built-ins min() and max():


  min(iterable[, key])
  
  Return the smallest item in an iterable
  or the smallest of two or more arguments.
  
  If one positional argument is provided, iterable must be a non-empty
  iterable (such as a non-empty string, tuple or list). The smallest
  item in the iterable is returned. If two or more positional arguments
  are provided, the smallest of the positional arguments is returned.





  max(iterable[, key])
  
  Return the largest item in an iterable or the
  largest of two or more arguments.
  
  If one positional argument is provided, iterable must be a non-empty
  iterable (such as a non-empty string, tuple or list). The largest item
  in the iterable is returned. If two or more positional arguments are
  provided, the largest of the positional arguments is returned.


So you'll have:

...
min_element, max_element = min(a_list), max(a_list)
...


Now, regarding you algorithm, you can avoid those hacks you were talking about by rewriting your function as:

def count_sort(array):
    min_element, max_element = min(array), max(array)
    count_array = [0] * (max_element - min_element + 1)

    for val in array:
        count_array[val - min_element] += 1

    sorted_array = []
    for i in range(min_element, max_element + 1):
        if count_array[i - min_element] &gt; 0:
            for j in range(0, count_array[i - min_element]):
                sorted_array.append(i)

    return sorted_array


More, as @ChatterOne mentioned, instead of the final for loop with append, you could do: 

sorted_array.extend([i] * count_array[i - min_element])


So, your final code would look like this:

def count_sort(array):
    min_element, max_element = min(array), max(array)
    count_array = [0] * (max_element - min_element + 1)

    for val in array:
        count_array[val - min_element] += 1

    sorted_array = []
    for i in range(min_element, max_element + 1):
        if count_array[i - min_element] &gt; 0:
            for j in range(0, count_array[i - min_element]):
                sorted_array.append(i)

    return sorted_array


if __name__ == '__main__':
    my_array = [3, 2, -1, 1, 5, 0, 10, 18, 25, 25]
    print(count_sort(my_array))


or

def count_sort(array):
    min_element, max_element = min(array), max(array)
    count_array = [0] * (max_element - min_element + 1)

    for val in array:
        count_array[val - min_element] += 1

    sorted_array = []
    for i in range(min_element, max_element + 1):
        if count_array[i - min_element] &gt; 0:
            sorted_array.extend([i] * count_array[i - min_element])

    return sorted_array


if __name__ == '__main__':
    my_array = [3, 2, -1, 1, 5, 0, 10, 18, 25, 25]
    print(count_sort(my_array))


Extras:

You can see that I also added if __name__ == '__main__'. By doing the main check, you can have that code execute only when you want to run the module as a program, and not have it execute when someone just wants to import your module and call your functions themselves.



I also changed the names min and max(which are already built-ins in Python) to min_element and max_element, respectively.



And the result:


[-1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 18, 25, 25]