this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Iv come to loathe the "pythonic way" because of this. They claim they wanted to make programming easier, but they sure went out of their way to not follow conventions and make it difficult to relearn. For example, for me not having lambdas makes python even more complex to work with. List operations are incredibly easy with map and filter, but they decided lambdas weren't "pythonic" and so we have these big cumbersome things instead with wildly different syntax.
Maybe I'm missing something, but:
So much Python criticism comes from people who don't know the language.
I mean, there is a lot wrong with it, but every language has its quirks. Generally I like discussing it's actual flaws cause it helps me better understand the language.
a lambdo which can only contain one expression, and not even a statement is pretty much useless. For anything nontrivial you have to write a separate function and have the lambda be just a function call expression. Which completely defeats the point
And switch cases (called match cases) are there as well.
I use lambdas all the time to shovel GTK signal emitions from worker threads into GLib.idle_add in a single line, works as you'd expect.
Previous commenters probably didn't look at Python in a really long time.
i mean tbf match case was only added in 3.10
Speaking of big cumbersome things with wildly different syntax have you tried a ternary operation in python lately? Omg that thing is ugly. JavaScripts is hard to beat.
uglyTernary = True: if python_syntax == “shit” else: False prettyTernary = javascript_syntax == “pretty” ? true : false
That’s just because you’re used to it. The pythonic ternary is structured like spoken language, which makes it easier to read, especially if you nest them.
Is there an objective argument for the conventional ternary, other than „That’s how we’ve always done it!“?
The conventional ternary is structured like a normal if-else. In fact, in many languages with functional influence, they're the same thing.
For example, you can write this in Rust:
I don't read spoken language, but I do read written ones. The problem with python's ternary is that it puts the condition in the middle, which means you have to visually parse the whole true:expression just to see where the condition starts. Which makes it hard to read for anything but the most trivial examples.
The same goes for comprehensions and generators
If the conventions suck you have to break them. How else can you improve things?
map and filter are almost always inferior to generators and comprehension expressions in terms of readability. If you prefer the former, it’s just because you got used to it, not because it’s better.
Tf, who needs lambdas in python?
anyone using map, filter, reduce, or anything in itertools or functools?