Hey guys, I'm really a lisp programmer at heart, but I'm doing python programming to pay the bills. So, I've been trying to make my python experience as functional as possible. Obviously, passing functions in as a parameter (or the closest thing I can get to that) is pretty important.

I've found that I can 1) define a function and pass in the name, 2) eval() a string, or 3) use a lambda without parameters. Stylistically, option 3 is much preferred -- however, it seems that there is a one-line limit for lambdas that is not going away any time soon.

I am wondering if there is some trick to get around that lambda limitation. Or some other approach I haven't considered.

I could be wrong about all this and making it up, but I believe it was this video (and I can't remember when, but it's around the time he talks about functional things) in which Guido discusses exactly this. Basically, he's not too big a fan of functional programming and it's supposed to be that lambdas are only one line. Similarly, he keeps wanting to get rid of reduce() and thinks it was a huge mistake.

I think it's part of the Python philosophy that you can do it in a million ways, but doing it the Python way is the safe, uncontroversial way that will probably work out OK. I think Python is the slightly conservative, middle-american of programming languages.