[mainland]

As much as I like Python, Guido has repeatedly demonstrated a pretty fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to functional programming concepts (I'm thinking in particular of past HN discussions regarding his confusion about the difference between tail calls and tail recursion). While it's entirely appropriate to take the stance that Python should not become "more functional" (whatever that means), it's not appropriate to do so without a clear understanding of what you're talking about.

For the record, here's a link to the Haskell Prelude version of reduce, aka, foldr. Looks like "a few lines" to me...

http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base-4.2.0...

[Xichekolas]

In looking at that, I was surprised to see that the foldr/build deforestation technique is still in use. That was part of my advisor's PhD work from the mid 90s.