If you're replacing a chain of filters and maps with a nested loop, you're far past "a simple loop" and well into the realm of an unintelligible for loop. The chain of maps and filters tends to make that far easier to read by decomposing it into separately-comprehensible pieces.
Oh totally agreed; for complex transformations, being able to compose and tap the intermediate states is really nice (though I quite like generator/yielding functions with captured stack state as a happy medium).
But that’s not the claim
I was pushing back on. That claim was that, given a loop and some equivalent chained list-processing functions, primarily FP-taught people could not understand the loop due to their background. That’s bogus.
That complex loops are hard to understand for anyone is inarguable. But there’s not some magical “functional mindset” in which imperative/mutative code is unintelligible to the point of total obscurity and functional code is not. If there were, how would anything ever get rewritten in a functional style?
