Comment by globular-toast

Most programmers aren't comfortable with higher-order functions, in my experience. Map and filter are special cases that they may have learnt, but other less common cases they don't understand.

Also, in many languages reduce is hobbled by the fact operators aren't functions. I used it Common Lisp all the time, but it's awkward to use in, say, Python as the function you want is so often an operator. It's also more beautiful if the operators are n-ary like in CL, so the result of (reduce #'+ '()) is the same as (+), ie. 0.