Your examples reveal that you don't get the point. Using a for loop instead of a higher-level abstraction like reduce or sum is a lot like using lambda calculu

Your examples reveal that you don't get the point. Using a for loop instead of a higher-level abstraction like reduce or sum is a lot like using lambda calculus instead of a summation in mathematics. We're trying to climb out of the Turing tarpit here by introducing useful abstractions, just like the summation operator was once introduced to make mathematics easier.