For compose to really shine, you need to be able to curry/partially apply functions. This part of things is made much more difficult than necessary because of Python's unnecessarily neutered lambda syntax (in fact, I don't think one can claim that Python is FP friendly until this decision is corrected).
It's also worth noting that reduce() was removed as a builtin for Python 3.
It's also worth noting that reduce() was removed as a builtin for Python 3.