[user5994461]

No offence but it only seems "more obvious and less error-prone" to you because you likely have experience with functional programming and dealing with maps (typical of functional programming).

There are plenty of programmers for whom this is cryptic, and they prefer an old-school "simple and straighforward" for loop (typical of imperative programming).

[stouset]

This is absurd — this mentality can be used to argue against literally every form of abstraction ever. The entire reason we have abstractions is to avoid writing the same redundant code over and over, with the associated likelihood of bugs due to typos.

What makes map more cryptic than literally any of the abstractions already in that example? Make is abstracting away GC-based memory allocation, indexing is abstracting away pointer arithmetic, and so on. Why are those abstractions fine, but "apply this function to everything in a collection" is somehow impenetrable voodoo?

"Simple and straightforward" often just boils down to "reams and reams of boilerplate code", where catching bugs is hard because it's impossible to notice a slight errors in one out of a hundred reimplementations of the same function.

[imron]

> There are plenty of programmers for whom this is cryptic

I've never really done functional programming, and map was cryptic the first time I saw it, but it's literally a concept that can be understood by any competent programmer in under 30 seconds - apply a function to every element of a collection and return a collection containing the results.

I don't have any sympathy for programmers who find simple abstractions like this cryptic but then don't try to understand them.