With programming it's actually hugely complicated, because are you trying to lower the mental effort to read, or the mental effort to write?

a + b is simple to write because it reminds you of high school mathematics.

However, I'd argue

  from operator import add, mul
      def square(x):
          return mul(x, x)
 
      def sum_squares(x, y):
          return add(square(x), square(y))
 
      result = sum_squares(5, 12)