[yason]

The functions are more first-class than list comprehensions and other syntactic alternatives. It's easier, both conceptually and lexically, to mangle, pass around, chain, and combine functions and function argument than it is to write nested list comprehensions.

Not against list comprehensions per se, really. They're just a convenient subset for most commonly idiomatic sequence-mangling-spells, but that's most of what they're good for.