Python really took the direction of preferring list/generator comprehensions for this kind of thing, encouraging their use over both imperative loops and basic HOFs like map/filter. List comprehensions are declarative and hence functional constructs.
Generators also get you another FP checkbox because you now have laziness in a very accessible form. You get building blocks like infinite sequences and so on. And you have access to all the normal primitives like reduce, take, partial, groupby etc in the itertools/functools std modules.
'More readable' is subjective. It's clear that Guido and much of the Python community believe that FP is less readable, less pythonic, and that viewpoint is exactly the sort of hostility towards FP that I'm talking about. And in no small part this is a self-fulfilling attitude, e.g. "python lambdas are ugly because pythonistas believe FP is ugly." They're way uglier in python than in other languages. The ugliness of python's lambda is a trait of python, not a trait of FP, yet it's ugliness cited to justify itself.
> when a for loop would be faster
Hey, that's fine. But I think much of the time for the sort of things I'm working on, that's deep into "premature optimization" territory. I'd rather a slight linear slowdown with more readable code than a slight linear speedup with less readable code. I'd prefer that python not "subtly discourage" me to nudge me towards less readable code because a list comprehension is marginally more performant.
