I feel like I come down hard on the side of lambdas, but I've never really spent enough time in a language with list comprehension, so there's a good chance I'm missing something.
I'm from a non-list-comprehension background too, but recently started working a lot in a large python codebase, and have found the dict/list comprehensions to be beautiful. I'm a huge fan. It's a shame lambda syntax is not the best and it's generally crippled, but comprehensions are a great 80/20 compromise for handling most cases very cleanly.
In theory I suppose the VM could have a map() implementation which opportunistically extracts the code from a lambda and inlines them when possible; but doubt CPython does that. OTOH, I'd be surprised if PyPy doesn't do something like that.
[1] http://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/06/from-list-compreh...
When doing something like `map(lambda x: 2+x, range(100))`, there will be 101 frames created: the outer frame, and 100 for each invocation of the lambda.
Whereas `[2+x for x in range(100)]` will only create 2: one for the outer frame, and one for the comprehension.