Later, I ran into some cases where I wanted a multi-line lambda. And my thought was "aaragh134!#?!"
Then, a weird thing happened. I started making a conscious effort to follow PEP 8. 79 column limit? Seriously? That sucks. But after weeks of struggling with it, something finally hit me. I realized I was writing better code by forcing myself to reduce code density. Sure, it was a little bit longer, but I spend way more time reading it than writing it.
Stop trying to fight it; assign a name to that lambda. Readability counts.
Stop trying to be clever; assign a name to that inner expression. Flat is better than nested.
De-emphasizing functional operations makes it more likely for libraries to work in a non-functional style, for tutorials to do so, etc.
It's tiring fighting against a community and a (benevolent) dictator that disagree with you.
That summarizes the problem I guess :D
Actually only one line of code is enough for each of map/filter:
def map(fn, seq): return [fn(each) for each in seq]
def filter(cond: seq): return [each for each in seq if cond(each)]
For simple cases, yes. But I wouldn't say
is more readable than at least for functional-thinking minds. The level of thinking in abstract is different here.Now the problem is, some people see Python as a very functional language (with first-class functions etc) and want to use it that way (like Lisp), but BDFL and some core Python devs believe it is better to keep it Pythonic, thus those functional people are kinda pissed off by this and switch away from Python.
Personally I don't think it will make Python a lot cleaner to remove two auxiliary functions and force people to use list comprehension when it is completely trivial to add these missing pair back (two lines of code).
(disclosure: I prefer FP, but I also think keeping things Pythonic is fine most of the time. It's just that in this case, I think map/filter is pretty "Pythonic" according to me. :)