[hinkley]

For me it's neutral, except for one critical difference.

I've been shepherding a bunch of front end Javascript tests, and recently had to go through fixing a systemic problem with how we were handling multiple promises.

The broken code didn't look too different from your second example, but the same three people made the same mistake repeatedly, leading to tests that generated empty lists and thus didn't verify anything.

Now, I'm not claiming this is a good pattern of testing. Indeed in all of the straightforward cases I removed the array entirely, and with great relish (especially since it also sped up the tests dramatically). And there are obviously some gaps in their theory of testing that they didn't notice the problem until I pointed it out.

But it did illustrate to me again that there are (alarmingly) a lot of people struggling with basic data manipulation, and if your language supports anything like list comprehensions, I think you should probably get used to using them. It keeps those gaps out, and makes people decompose the problem instead of mashing together a block of conditional code that reads like a Choose Your Own Adventure.