They probably mean you need to import some modules to do things like partial functions. But it's not like functional programming is not possible in Python. I'd argue that Elixir's syntax is more of hindrance to FP than Haskell's elegant syntax.
No, if importing something was enough it would be fine. It's more that how a lambda can only contain a single expression means you need to split and name things everywhere, how you can't pipe/chain things means you need to have intermediate variables or an ungodly amount of nesting etc. Yeah, technically feasible, but it's not "pythonic" so you solve it some other (to me) less elegant way.
> It's more that how a lambda can only contain a single expression
That's exactly how lambdas (and all functions) work in actually functional languages like Haskell. And it's a good thing,lambdas shouldn't allow statements.
> how you can't pipe/chain things
Ironically after switching from Elixir to a language where I can have any operator I wish, I found myself using the equivalent of Elixir's |> only on a very rare occasion. IMO they're vastly overrated.
Hmm, you can surely use multiple lets in a lambda in haskell, as in every other function?
And it doesn't have to be the pipe operator, just something similar. Like list.map().filter().reduce() instead of reduce(filter(map(list))) which quickly gets unwindly.
But in other languages it's clear what the code is doing. If you have a chain of map, filters and other operations, they are all named and easy to grok. In a python list comprehension a lot of things will be going on, without named parts. So then you need to name stuff to keep track. So you got foo, then foo_filtered, then foo_sorted, then foo_grouped. And that doesn't really convey anything more than in a language where you would do foo.filter().sort().group().
