[hepta]

> That's the risk of reading articles like the OP, where they show you a couple functional tricks in an imperative language that inherently can't give you the whole picture.

The other risk is that people (like me, a few years ago) are sufficiently convinced by these simple loop examples that they decide to apply them. This might (or might not) lead to greater functional aspirations which make "whole picture" much more interesting. You might get to free monads, but not before you've used a fold on a list.