Lisp mentality vs. Python mentality

["Martin v. Löwis"]

>     From your comments I understand that the only problem with my code
> proposal are the function names...

No, the problem is that you are using way too many functions, that do
too little. The problem with that is then that you have to give names
to all the functions, which then find people difficult to read because
they don't just need to the code in question itself; they also need to
dozen of helper functions that it relies on.

>     And about the find_index, we could rename it to
> first_matching_index. About the negation optional parameter, we could
> eliminate it if we allow either: to have another function
> first_missmatching_index, but this leads to namespace bloat, or we
> have a function named negate, that takes another function, and negates
> it meaning. 

Or you could avoid introducing the function altogether, to make it more
readable. This makes it more pythonic, also: readability counts (from
the Zen of Python).

Regards,
Martin