cytoolz

It's a package, not a built in, but pytoolz [0] is a very complete solution to the type of functional programming munging you are taking about. I wish more people knew about it (no one here seems to have mentioned it). And it has been Cython optimized in another package called cytoolz [1]. The author explains in the Heritage section how it is an extension of and plays nice with itertools and functools [2]. For Python coders new to functional programming, and how it can make working with data easier, I highly recommend reading the following sections of the pytoolz docs: Composability, Function Purity, Laziness, and Control Flow [0]. [0] https://toolz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [1] https://github.com/pytoolz/cytoolz [2] https://toolz.readthedocs.io/en/latest/heritage.html

Toolz is one of my favorite python libraries. I use it all the time. It provides even more of this useful functionality. It also has a sped-up version called Cytoolz written with Cython. https://toolz.readthedocs.io https://github.com/pytoolz/cytoolz

It is sometimes hard to justify a dependency - many of toolz/fn.py/funcy functions are not hard to write manually. The great thing about toolz is its https://github.com/pytoolz/cytoolz counterpart which provides an optimized implementation of toolz. It is useful when you have a bottleneck in Python code - e.g. run several functions (functoolz.juxt), merge dictionaries (dicttooz.merge), etc. With cytoolz the code becomes prettier and faster, not only prettier, so it is easier for cytoolz to sneak in.