This isn't very readable at all and certainly not any more readable than a chain of method calls, being that you've spread the operations out in different place

This isn't very readable at all and certainly not any more readable than a chain of method calls, being that you've spread the operations out in different places. It's not even syntactically obvious what the `key` argument is passed to if one doesn't know that `sorted` takes it. None of those problems exist when piping through normal functions or chaining method calls. Python is for the most part overrated when it comes to these things, IMO. It's a nice enough language but it's aged badly and has an undeserved reputation for concision, readability and being "simple".