You only get the ease-of-implementation benefit if you are willing to explicitly mark every _use_ of a lazy-imported name as special (and give the fully qualified name at every usage site). This is rather more cumbersome (assuming multiple uses in a module) than just explicitly marking an import as lazy in one location and then using the imported name in multiple places normally. Other "lazy import" solutions are trying to solve a problem where you want the name to be usable (without special syntax or marking) in many different places in a module, and visible in the module namespace always -- but not actually imported until someone accesses/uses it. The difficulty arises because in this case you need some kind of placeholder for the "deferred import", but you need to avoid this "deferred object" escaping and becoming visible to Python code without being resolved first. Explicitly marking which imports are lazy is fine if you want it (it's just a matter of syntax), but it doesn't do anything to solve the problem of allowing usage of the lazy-imported name to be transparent. I agree that the idea that top-of-module imports help readability is overstated; it sounds slightly Stockholm-syndrome-ish to me :) Top-of-module imports are frankly a pain to maintain and a pain to read (because they are often distant from the uses of the names). But they are a necessary evil if you want a) namespaces and b) not constantly retyping fully-qualified names at every usage site. Python is pretty committed to namespaces at this point (and I wouldn't want to change that), so that leaves the choice between top-of-module imports vs fully qualifying every use of every name; pick your poison. (Inline imports in a scope with multiple uses are a middle ground.) Carl