That's a fair criticism of my confusion, but I think I made my point poorly. The way map is implemented may be useful for some usecases and more convenient to i

That's a fair criticism of my confusion, but I think I made my point poorly. The way map is implemented may be useful for some usecases and more convenient to implement, but it is a a very poor fit for many other usecases. As an example of one of the many ways to solve this to make it more sane, the Rust language allows you to call .iter() on something that can be looped over, but also .enum(), which gives you an index and the item. In this way, you can manage expectations about what you are actually getting. Javascript hands you all the tools at once unconditionally which strips a lot of the abstracting power away.