I personally think either function is fine. The max finding code pattern in the long function should be familiar to most. For the Pythonic function, I don't think it's less obvious enough to matter. You have a list of stuffs and you want to find the max so you wrap it in the max function. Maybe zip(xs, xs[1:]) can take a bit to recognize but I think it's eh. For the Pythonic one, one can also write

    all_diffs = [x2-x1 for x1, x2 in zip(xs, xs[1:])]
    return max(all_diffs)

[0] https://gist.github.com/squaresmile/8dd08898851a4e19359cdb30...