[mntmoss]

What tends to be absent in the simple analysis that leads to these kinds of hammer-to-all-nails solutions is a full enumeration of the classes of errors or intractable problems in the domain, and how the proposal does or does not address each.

This blogpost does not even attempt such an enumeration, but instead appeals to aesthetics.

FWIW I went through a period of using map and filter a little bit, went, "that's nice", and then resumed using for loops, sometimes with comprehension syntax to sugar it up. Both methods basically cover ways to specify simple iteration and selection. But I know which one is going to port better across the majority of environents: the plain for-next, and if a complex iteration is called for, the while loop. It puts the data allocation where I can see it, and it maps to the single-threaded computing model that is still the default today.

If I want a more complex query, I am going to start wanting a more expressive query language than either imperative or functional selection and iteration can provide by themselves. Left outer joins do not come easily to either method. Neither does constraint logic programming. You obviously can implement those things, but it isn't blindingly obvious, and when your problem grows to need a very broad expression of selection and iteration, it is those kinds of tools that you really need to aim for.