I understand what you're saying and you make good points but I still do not think removing a loop as a language feature is necessarily an interesting goal. Generally speaking this discussion tends to revolve around reducing verbosity or doing more with less (so, generalizing multiple language features into a single one). I'm just not sure if that's the most interesting discussion to have. The goal and primary focus should be clean, readable, maintainable code. If I buy a more maintainable and more easy to share codebase with a few extra lines of code or a more verbose expression of a loop that's a trade I'd always make (note; I'm not claiming that's necessarily a trade you need to make for every case in every language).