The risk of identifier collisions with itemgetter seems really low. I've never had a problem with from operator import itemgetter sort(values, key=itemgett

The risk of identifier collisions with itemgetter seems really low. I've never had a problem with from operator import itemgetter sort(values, key=itemgetter(2)) The main problem is the effort of typing the import, but last time I checked itemgetter performed a bit better. To me it depends on what I'm writing. If it's a library where performance will matter then it's the itemgetter approach. If it's a script it will be the lambda.