What is the 'pythonic' equivalent to the 'fold' function from functional programming?

Question

What is the most idiomatic way to achieve something like the following, in Haskell:

foldl (+) 0 [1,2,3,4,5]
--> 15

Or its equivalent in

Answer 1

The actual answer to this (reduce) problem is: Just use a loop!

initial_value = 0
for x in the_list:
    initial_value += x #or any function.

This will be faster than a reduce and things like PyPy can optimize loops like that.

BTW, the sum case should be solved with the sum function