Agree with all your points, but I guess one advantage I can see to being more strictly "array purist" is that it forces one to write the whole program in such a

Agree with all your points, but I guess one advantage I can see to being more strictly "array purist" is that it forces one to write the whole program in such a way that SIMD & GPU etc optimizations would apply. These days dealing with things in array-sized chunks and avoiding excessive branching has huge advantages, performance wise, but most languages (especially OO languages) herd you into conditional branches on individual scalars, all over the place. Obviously not applicable for the vast majority of applications, but something to think about: that it would be nice to see array-orientation further up the stack than just "compute this bulk data set on the GPU/TPU."