[rkrzr]

Functional languages use recursion instead of for and while loops. Recursion is a more general mechanism that can be used to implement the equivalent of for and while loops.

So in short, functional programmers do not "hate" looping construct, but simply don't need them since you can use recursion instead (in practice you actually rarely use recursion directly, but instead use functions like map, fold, sum, etc. which are implemented recursively).