Andrei keeps bringing up the idea of getting rid of string lambdas, but I don't think that there was ever an actual discussion and consensus on than in the newsgroup (mostly just shorter discussions in pull requests). It's definitely agreed that the new lambdas are better in many situations, and Andrei seems to have decided that the string lambdas were a failure and that they should be scrapped. Personally, I'd hate to lose them (much as the new lambda syntax is better in many situations), because in many simple cases, the string lambdas are shorter and cleaner. It would also be incredibly inconsistent if we support them with some functions but not others. But AFAIK, there's no general agreement on the matter.