| Well, the BDFL is probably the only dictator we all love. Any decision he made is infinitely more than I could. Because I am just a python user, and an outsider in any decision making process. So for me, he's right all the time. That's a perfect definition of a dictator :) But I do have wishes. It's like I love my parents but I do want to stay up late sometimes. Yeah, I totally missed the part he removed reduce from builtin. Sorry about my memory. map, filter, or reduce, it does not matter. As I stated, some problems are better solved functional way. Because Python is such a friendly language, if it includes functional paradigm properly, it would make the functional part more readable than other functional languages. FP is scary not because it has evil syntax to keep people at distance, it's just an alien paradigm to many. Lot's of non functional languages has functional support, which doesn't make them less readable. E.g. C#, JS. I suspect these languages have helped many understanding FP more. Python could make the jump by including more FP, but not turning into a full-fledged FP. BTW. I'm still glad reduce is kept in functools. |
I guess my argument is that Python is friendly exactly because it uses FP paradigms sparingly and conscientiously. Some paradigms such as map and filter can definitely make your code cleaner, while others (such as reduce) only lead to headaches. That being said as you mention we are getting pattern matching, I'm curious to see how that ends up.
i would argue that C# and JS do also use it sparingly and don't go too hard, but also that Python is generally a cleaner language than those. It's hard to know how much of it can be attributed to what, but generally, it's not a trivial thing to predict what impacts a given language feature will have on the readability of the code. A given FP paradigm might be cool in isolation, but when stacked with 4 other ones, it can quickly lead to gibberish code.