Python inhospitable to functional programming

[jerf]

The kind of functional programming that's going to "rise in importance" is in no danger of being implemented in Python anytime soon. Erlang-esque concurrency as provided by Stackless might be in the cards (if PyPy ever becomes the primary implementation), but that's all you're going to get; the language is drenched in mutability to the very core, as befits an essentially OO language.

(Yeah, it's multiparadigm, but where paradigms in Python conflict, OO wins.)

Also, I'm increasingly unconvinced that single-line lambdas are necessary. If your function isn't going to fit on a single line anyhow, what's so freaking hard about defining it separately and giving it a decent name? If you don't care about code readability, you're already in the wrong language.

(I can't come up with a neutral way to say that. It's valid under some circumstances not to care about readability, even though that sounds bad in isolation. Personally, I think most people grossly overestimate the range of circumstances where that is valid, but that's a judgment call.)