Decorators are another example of functional programming added to Python, but with a pythonic syntax.

Python supports both imperative, OO and functional idioms, but generally only prefers one of them for a specific task. For example loops are preferred to recursive functions when appropriate. Objects are preferred to closures for mutable state, so mutation of captures variables has not been supported (support have been added recently with nonlocal, but it has clearly not been a priority).

Python is interesting because it is multiparadigm while trying to avoid fragmentation where you can solve the same problem in totally different styles.

There's a quote from Guido about private attribute access where he said, "We're all adults", and that leaving the open is beneficial.

Recursion is another tool that he should let us adults use if it solves a problem better and TCE is lovely feature to have. Frankly, if you're using recursion, you either just learned it in a CompSci class or you know what you're doing. Either way, daddy Guido shouldn't tell us no :).

Anyway, at the very least there's two camps. On the one side, you have the hardcore Scheme folks whose conception of functional programming is "if I can't figure out how to write it with tail recursion it must not be computable". On the other side you have the Haskell folks whose conception of functional programming is "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"

Somewhere in between are people who actually get things done.