In my opinion using reduce, map and zip is not a good idea in this case. What are they needed for? I don't even think your approach is more functional than the

In my opinion using reduce, map and zip is not a good idea in this case. What are they needed for? I don't even think your approach is more functional than the examples above. I mean, this one line should be equally functional and .. it's shorter and even more understandable: open(sys.argv[2], 'w').writelines(sorted(open(sys.argv[1])) (Btw you're talking about a nicer lambda syntax but imho your example looks ugly because of all the unneeded stuff you've put into it)