Now how much nicer would it be if even more things were functions, rather than special syntax like here? This can be done with an `apply`.

I think the star syntax is a lot nicer than `apply`. Python actually had an `apply` builtin, but it was deprecated in Python 2.3.

Apply, and first class / higher order functions in general are good in languages where they compose well. Python's * won't compose well.

To add a small footnote to the existing replies to this comment: A related, but slightly different, function in the `functools` module (part of the Python standard library) is the `partial` function. It is like apply() but returns a function instead of calling the function and return its return value:

    f1 = partial(f, 1, 2)
    f2 = partial(f1, 3, 4)
    f2(5, 6)  # equivalent to f(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

It also supports kwargs.

How wouldn't * not compose as well as apply?

It is a function - print() is being called as a function, taking a number of positional, arguments followed by named argument. I don't think you're correct about this being special syntax, except for the '*' is being used to expand a list into the positional arguments.

I believe they meant replacing the special * syntax with a use of apply so that there was no special syntax to achieve that functionality at all.

I'm not the sharpest functional programmer in the cohort, but isn't `apply` a parallelizable for-loop?

    apply(l, print)

is the same as

    for el in l:
      print(el)

which is a number of print statements, rather than 1 print statement with a number of arguments.