lambda in list comprehension acting funny

[John Ladasky]

Exactly.  It's threads like these which remind me why I never use lambda.  I would rather give a function an explicit name and adhere to the familiar Python syntax, despite the two extra lines of code.  I don't even like the name "lambda".  It doesn't tell you what it is (unless you're John McCarthy), a function that you won't re-use and so you don't really need to give it a persistent name.  

I haven't seen any lambdas in any Python library code, or in any of the third-party modules I use (numpy, matplotlib, Biopython).  Do they exist?  Because I have not been forced to do so, I haven't retained a space in the top drawer of my programming brain for lambda.

I know the historical reason that Python ended up with lambda, it was requested by people in the Lisp community.  While I appreciate some of the Lisp-like features which did find their way into Python (especially being able to treat code as data, and functions as objects), I've found that lambda does nothing for me.