Over the years, I've seen a few posts like this that seem to take it as a given that a loop in a normal programming language is better than foreach capability in a template language. Certainly enough times to believe that a significant group of people actually believe it's superior.

There's not a difference in capability of expression of the two models. It seems to be a purely aesthetic or comfort difference.

I guess different people like different things.

It's because native programming language will defacto allow you to hack it to its natural limit. A tendency most all programmers have given they even get into programming.

For example with any iterator/loop you may want to filter, or find, or transform. in ruby you have the entire Enumerable API to dig into or Array prototype for js.

a templating language would have to reimplement functionality one by one in an allow list.

it's just fatigue at that point, yet another API i've got to mentally track.

edit: of course if you export the view data "clean" before hand it compels you to not have intense logic in the view. I get that but after a decade+ in product, views are never pure, even just ability to highlight the active tab takes conditional and select logic in a loop.

I see that as a feature.

I would rather that all the developers were "encouraged" to do the filtering and sorting in some kind of logic block rather than having an attractive footgun lying around that makes it easy to cram in one more last data adjustment.

To each their own I suppose.