I'd use functional programming, which is what I'd thought this post would be about. It seems the author is not familiar with the concepts of mapping, reducing and filtering. This is just a map() command.
If you were a programming language designer, would you implement a map, filter or reduce command?
God yes. As a .net developer, it's extremely rare for a day to go by where I don't put them to use (via linq). They get so much stuff done.
yes, of course. And obviously I would do it with loops, so you don't have to. Ultimately a Turing machine needs to have loops somewhere. The best you can do is abstract them.