Uh... sorry, but I don't think that's right.
The purpose of writing functions with tail recursion isn't "I want to write a for-loop but I want it to 'look' functional." The purpose of tail recursion is to make easy certain kinds of implementations.
If you have a recursive data structure, using tail recursion over that structure is significantly more straightforward than writing iteratively. I actually wrote a comment about this recently: [0]. When using recursively-defined data, it makes more sense to write the traversal functions recursively. Functional programming makes significant use of recursion because, when dealing primarily with functions and immutable data, recursion is the simplest tool for the job.
> Functions are first class objects in python so you can, if you really want, write functional code. It just all kinda goes to shit when you start importing other people's libraries that demand classes and methods being used. Those libraries are just a major part of what benefit you get from using python.
I guess that's one way of looking at it, yeah. But if Python had better support (and encouragement) of functional programming, it seems to me that we'd have more functionally-styled libraries.