Yeah, adult muggles who've been taught in bad languages. If we get first crack at a kid, HOFs are natural.
But honestly, if you find a loop readable, it's because you've learned the arcane skill of taking in the entire loop at a glance, the way a chess master can take in a chess position, and mentally transforming it into the equivalent of a HOF: "Oh, yeah, this loop transforms each word to its first letter" or whatever. If you were a beginner and actually had to walk through the loop, simulating a computer in your head, you wouldn't find loops so readable.
And unless you're a programming grand master, taking in the loop at a glance doesn't protect you against off-by-one errors and the like, which can't happen with HOFs.
I wish you were not right about this, Brian, but of course you're right.
I remember the day when my older son was Freshman in high school and his teacher gave him a programming assignment, involving a loop.
At the time I could not understand why my son decided that if "programming is about the iterative loops" then he just doesn't want to do it, no matter how his Dad (i.e. myself) tried to convince him that thinking in terms of a variable initialization and loops is the most natural way of thinking.
But, now I see it was not my son's fault. It was my fault and my son's teacher's fault.
Nah, it's the fault of professors who write texts that way. And FOR loops aren't so bad if the topic is really about integers, e.g., computing factorials or powers.
