At the end of the Functional Programming HOWTO document (https://docs.python.org/3.7/howto/functional.html) the usage of reduce/lambda/for loops are compared and discussed. However, the example for reduce seems sub-optimal and thus the discussion is not that efficient. The example:

total = functools.reduce(lambda a, b: (0, a[1] + b[1]), items)[1]

could be changed to:

total = functools.reduce(lambda total, item: total + item[1], items, 0)

which is much more readable and is actually not much inferior to the loop one (though the sum approach is still more concise).