Python's simplicity philosophy

[Terry Reedy]

"Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message
news:Jj4ub.42718$hV.1644648 at news2.tin.it...
> The point is that the primary meaning of "reduce" is "diminish",
> and when you're summing (positive:-) numbers you are not diminishing
> anything whatsoever

Yes you are: you are reducing the number of numbers.  Data reduction
is a standard term (in US at least) for literally reducing lots of
numbers to a fewer number of numbers, like count, sum, mean,
sum_of_squares, variance, and/or maybe a few others.  As the volumn of
data generated by observational and experimental studies explodes,
useful reduction becomes even more important.

. unless you think in terms of multidimensional
> arrays and diminishing dimensionality,

Reducing a dimension 1 vector to a dimension 0 number is reduction in
both senses.  But even reduction of a homogeneous array to tuple of
statistics is reduction in number if not dimension.

Perhaps my career in statistics and data reduction made reduce() more
immediately obvious to me than some other people.

Terry J. Reedy