Sure, once you cherry-pick the most trivial imaginable example ternary expressions are easy enough to read. First counter-example which came to mind: print("

Sure, once you cherry-pick the most trivial imaginable example ternary expressions are easy enough to read. First counter-example which came to mind: print("yes") if random.choice([True, False]) else print("no") Does this do the right thing? I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is indeed lazily evaluated, but that's not at all intuitive: first because `print("yes")` comes before the conditional (note that the Lisp example had the conditional first), and second because not all popular languages work like that. There are lots of examples where ternary makes things obviously harder to read, such as when at least two of the three expressions are non-trivial. Which one would you rather read? if some_complex_condition(using, four, different, parameters): do_a_thing(now, using, five, different, parameters) else: do_another_thing(with, three, parameters) or do_a_thing(now, using, five, different, parameters) if some_complex_condition(using, four, different, parameters) else do_another_thing(having, three, parameters) (or do_a_thing(now, using, five, different, parameters) if some_complex_condition( using, four, different, parameters ) else do_another_thing(having, three, parameters) after Black.)