> I do agree that emphasis on making these features more prominent, especially at the expense of more explicit (e.g. explicit for-loop) constructs, might hinder traction.

I thin kit depends on both where the new users are coming from, and how much they've modified their thinking to a specific programming style. If you are a C or C++ programmer and already think in conceptualized for loops when planning steps, then it seems odd. If you haven't gone that far into letting that style define your thoughts, or continued to use other languages that were a bit more functional, you might find that that conceptually it's easier to reason about.

I.e. "I'm going to transform each of these items by doing X, Y and Z and store them here" as a concept is neither directly a for loop nor a map a the basest level, but you might start thinking in maps or loops after a while if that's your only option.