Are they really foot-guns? The lambda variable reference thing has appeared more in forums comparing languages than I’ve seen it used at all in python and I’ve spent a lot of time working in large open source python projects with thousands of contributors.

Even if you got the binding right, your powers of 2 would be shot down for being unpythonic anyway due to lambdas being shunned when there are cleaner ways to write things.

powers_of_x makes no sense as a variable name for a list of functions that you have to call in order with the same number to actually get the powers of that number. I get that it’s just a contrived example, but most can be turned into someone more apparent to the reader.

    def powers_of_x(x, limit=10):
        for i in range(limit):
            yield x^i

Less memory, no anonymous functions, more flexibility, testable...