[Python-ideas] Proposal: A Reduce-Map Comprehension and a "last" builtin

[Paul Moore]

On 10 April 2018 at 19:25, Peter O'Connor <peter.ed.oconnor at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kyle Lahnakoski made a pretty good case for not using itertools.accumulate() earlier in this thread

I wouldn't call it a "pretty good case". He argued that writing
*functions* was a bad thing, because the name of a function didn't
provide all the details of what was going on in the same way that
explicitly writing the code inline would do. That seems to me to be a
somewhat bizarre argument - after all, encapsulation and abstraction
are pretty fundamental to programming. I'm not even sure he had any
specific comments about accumulate other than his general point that
as a named function it's somehow worse than writing out the explicit
loop.

> But in a way that more intuitively expresses the intent of the code, it
> would be great to have more options on the market.

It's worth adding a reminder here that "having more options on the
market" is pretty directly in contradiction to the Zen of Python -
"There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do
it".

Paul