It's certainly true sometimes one must do acrobatics to avoid writing a simple for loop. The main problem for me is usually the unnecessary use of memory (I use memmap quite liberally). In that regard Julia at least is able to chain together multiple operations to avoid temporary arrays.

On the other hand, and I know is a little niche application, consider writing code for execution on GPUs. Now it's great you are capable of expressing your algorithms using the language of matrix and vector operations and can forget about moving memory in and out of the GPU, threads, blocks, warps and other arcana.

I think that what you call "a sane programming environment" just means "an easy programming environment for me". I don't mind at all having to import libraries. Have you ever tried to structure a big Matlab project?

So basically I agree you with about having fast for loops and disagree on everything else.