Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered. But it's still obnoxious in 2025.
The whole thing reminds me of D&D, which is full of classes & spells that only exist in modern D&D because of One Guy who happened to be at the table with Gygax, who really wanted to be a wuxia guy he saw in a movie, or because he really wanted a spell to be applicable for that one night at the table, and now it's hard-coded into the game.
The one thing I could never ever get was using a regex - not the regex itself but the line to actually use it.
Python was so much easier as it was simple define the regex and then use a function on it. I suppose I should hjave spent a few days to write some wrapper in perl - doing those few days would have saved me time overall.
As for one liners I was originally an APL programmer so not a problem. But it is just bad style to write a one liner much better to write it in a maintainable form and split up the operations so they can be seen.
Nowadays I ddon't use lambdas if possible - much better to have a named function you can refer to.
That's funny. I avoid python whenever possible, but one of the things I hate the most is how it is doing regex. I find the way it works in perl (both for search/replace and in conditionals) just intuitive.