I suspect the difference of opinion is due to a different understanding of what a functional style is. Python does not have tail call elimination. You literal

I suspect the difference of opinion is due to a different understanding of what a functional style is. Python does not have tail call elimination. You literally can not write lots of normal functional programs in python. Python doesn't have currying and requires explicit extra code to create partially applied functions. This makes functional programming painful and verbose. I think you are writing what I would call imperative code that uses some functional constructs where it is shorter. No doubt that is shorter than sticking entirely to imperative code, but it is a far cry from writing a program in functional style which requires that you not use imperative constructs.