That code seems suspect. Throwing and catching BaseException is bad/has some weird consequences and probably unintentional - I assume the author meant to use Exception? Pathologically avoiding `elif`. Misspelling `inspect` in the code examples which are ostensibly verbatim Python sessions.
In general, lambda functions are less necessary in Python because functions are first-class. The lambda syntax is useful for extremely trivial functions, e.g. `sorted(a, key=lambda value: value.foo_bar())`, but otherwise "normal" functions work just fine/better - especially since you can define a function wherever you want. (This is how it's supposed to be. E.g. in Java or Javascript, code using many lambdas can be a royal pain to debug.)
Maybe related, I dislike the use of `map` and `filter`. Almost all real-world cases are more readable using list/dict/set comprehension or generator expressions. The only thing missing now is assignment expressions (PEP 572, [0]) so I can do a map + filter in one comprehension.