Yeah I knew someone was going to say that (see last sentence), but a for loop is more powerful and general than reduce().

Mutability within the loop is useful, and it can be controlled by processes and message passing.

I'm not sure "powerful" is the right word here, it's more a matter of "what certain people are used to". If you want a counter or whatever, you can use a tuple to give yourself multiple accumulators. You could argue it's uglier, but I wouldn't necessarily agree. It's something that is easy to get used to if you remove the "but I'd rather just do it this way" mindset.

I assumed you meant something like Enum.sum that completely trivializes the code. In comparison, generic, higher level functions are pretty fundamental to FP.

the problem with a for loop is that it is inexplicit about what from the outer scope can be mutated. Which isn't a problem, for small functions but I have definitely seen monster for loops in professionally written django code with ~500 lines of code in the function.

Besides being in that magical sweet spot (executes imperatively but reads declaratively), a reduce forces you to declare ahead of time what things can be carried over and mutated between each iteration.

> it can be controlled by processes and message passing.

DO NOT DO THIS YOU WILL REGRET THIS SIMCITY MEME