Me too. I think the introduction of the functional module will actually be good, because there's less resistance to adding clever features for higher-order func

Me too. I think the introduction of the functional module will actually be good, because there's less resistance to adding clever features for higher-order functions in the standard library than there is in the core language (in Python, at least, since it aims to be small and beginner-friendly). Look at the itertools module to see how that turned out -- lots of useful tricks borrowed from the ML family, and you can "buy it by the yard".