A critic of Guido's blog on Python's lambda

[Ketil Malde]

aleax at mac.com (Alex Martelli) writes:

>> Any time you want an anonymous function (or class, or type, or number)
>> it would be because that thing is sufficiently small and simple that the
>> best name for it is the code itself.

> In the real world, people don't choose anonymous functions only in
> these alleged cases where anonymous is best 

In the real world, people do a lot of things they shouldn't.

Any feature can be abused, and poor style is possible in any
language.   I just checked my code for lambdas, and they are
exclusively short half-liners passed as parameters to higher order
functions.  Naming them would only complicate the code, just like
naming (other) intermediate results would.

> if anonymous functions are available, they're used in even more
> cases where naming would help

Perhps, but not necessarily.  But how about the converse: if every
function must be named, they will be named even where naming them
hurts. 

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants