Comment by merlincorey

Maybe it's because I am also something of a lisper (like Norvig), but I don't see anything wrong with inline ifs (after all, that is how if works in lisp, with returns for a conditional, like the ternary operator) or lambda functions. In fact, I find that improves readability dramatically because it more declaratively says what you are trying to accomplish in many cases.

For example:

  absolute_path = lambda path: path if path.startswith('/') else '/' + path

To me this is perfectly clearly a simple function whose only purpose is to prepend forward slashes to unix-style paths. Is the following really so much more readable?

  def absolute_path(path):
      if not path.startswith('/'):
          path = '/' + path
      return path

To my eyes and mind, the second example is not any more readable at the expense of several lines of code.