How to sort a list of strings in reverse order without using reverse=True parameter?

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You’ll have to sort twice. Python’s sort algorithm is stable, which means that elements that are equal keep their relative order. Use this to first sort on the second element (sorting in ascending order), then sort that output again, on only the first element and in reverse order:

sorted(sorted(my_list2, key=lambda t: t[1]), key=lambda t: t[0], reverse=True)

Using operator.itemgetter() instead of lambdas can make this little bit faster (avoiding stepping back in to the Python interpreter for each element):

from operator import itemgetter

sorted(sorted(my_list2, key=itemgetter(1)), key=itemgetter(0), reverse=True)

Demo:

>>> from operator import itemgetter
>>> my_list2 = [('aaa', 'bbb'), ('aaa', 'ccc'), ('bbb', 'aaa'), ('bbb', 'ccc')]
>>> sorted(sorted(my_list2, key=lambda t: t[1]), key=lambda t: t[0], reverse=True)
[('bbb', 'aaa'), ('bbb', 'ccc'), ('aaa', 'bbb'), ('aaa', 'ccc')]
>>> sorted(sorted(my_list2, key=itemgetter(1)), key=itemgetter(0), reverse=True)
[('bbb', 'aaa'), ('bbb', 'ccc'), ('aaa', 'bbb'), ('aaa', 'ccc')]

The general rule is to sort from the innermost element to the outermost element. So for an arbitrary-element-count sort, with a key and a reverse boolean each, you can use the functools.reduce() function to apply these:

from functools import reduce
from operator import itemgetter

def sort_multiple(sequence, *sort_order):
    """Sort a sequence by multiple criteria.

    Accepts a sequence and 0 or more (key, reverse) tuples, where
    the key is a callable used to extract the value to sort on
    from the input sequence, and reverse is a boolean dictating if
    this value is sorted in ascending or descending order.

    """
    return reduce(
        lambda s, order: sorted(s, key=order[0], reverse=order[1]),
        reversed(sort_order),
        sequence
    )

sort_multiple(my_list2, (itemgetter(0), True), (itemgetter(1), False))

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