The main issue is syntactic: Python's syntax is such that reduce() isn't terribly useful. If Python had an equivalent of blocks in Ruby or at least the ability

The main issue is syntactic: Python's syntax is such that reduce() isn't terribly useful. If Python had an equivalent of blocks in Ruby or at least the ability to write non-trivial lambdas, I can see reduce() being useful, but as things stand, it's just kind of useless.