I've seen some programmers try to avoid the humble for loop at all costs, in favor of more functional abstractions. I'm going to argue that the for loop is sometimes simply the best option. That doesn't mean you should always use it -- far from it -- but it does mean you should give it due consideration. The goal is to help develop some intuitions about this topic. I talk about readability of code in this post, but I also talk about performance. My argument will be that there are cases where the for loop combines readability with performance. I'm focusing on JavaScript as the example language, but it can stand in for many languages with similar characteristics like Python and Ruby. But the culture of JavaScript leans more towards functional programming patterns than these other languages, so I think it's the appropriate language to highlight. …