How about:

def choose_todo(temp, mood):
print([['go hiking', 'go fishing'], ['go hiking', 'stay home']][temp == 'below
60'][mood == 'sad'])

Less readable, probably runs slower than the if-elif-else ladder cause you have to pay for the object creation; I’m just bored and felt like writing an alternate solution

Dave’s wins in terms of readability and elegance, though.

That being said, I recently showed a couple of strong students and article on functional programming in Python and they really loved that syntax. Maybe it’s something I’ll teach more explicitly in the future.

print “Go hiking” if mood == “happy” else “Go fishing” if temp >= 60 else “Stay home”

I didn’t expect such stark differences on what I considered a pretty uninteresting question…

Yup. You’re differentiating between the good and the excellent, but the gap is even wider between those who get programming and those who don’t, and the test to distinguish between the two isn’t very complicated: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000635.html

This gap persists at all skill levels by the way. The difference between an average professional programmer and an excellent one is immense. We see this all the time when giving take-home programming assignments during interviews. The results that come back invariably fall into one of three buckets: unacceptable, average or fantastic.