Exactly. It's threads like these which remind me why I never use lambda. I would rather give a function an explicit name and adhere to the familiar Python syntax, despite the two extra lines of code. I don't even like the name "lambda". It doesn't tell you what it is (unless you're John McCarthy), a function that you won't re-use and so you don't really need to give it a persistent name.
I haven't seen any lambdas in any Python library code, or in any of the third-party modules I use (numpy, matplotlib, Biopython). Do they exist? Because I have not been forced to do so, I haven't retained a space in the top drawer of my programming brain for lambda. I know the historical reason that Python ended up with lambda, it was requested by people in the Lisp community. While I appreciate some of the Lisp-like features which did find their way into Python (especially being able to treat code as data, and functions as objects), I've found that lambda does nothing for me. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
