I'm partially defending list comprehensions here and partially challenging you to consider the possibility that there are higher levels of abstraction out there than those employed by functional programming primitives like map and filter.
Level 0: for-loops with an explicit accumulator
Level 1: map + filter (!)
Level 2: ??? arguably an atemporal set-theoretic approach
In practice in python list comprehensions are a superior syntax for computing with multiple source collections.
(!) Really all you need is reduce
map = lambda f,l: reduce(lambda h,t: h + f(t), l, [])
filter = lambda f,l: reduce(lambda h,t: h + t if f(t) else h, l, [])
You'd be silly to implement them that way of course but
know your tools.
Level 0: for-loops with an explicit accumulator
Level 1: map + filter (!)
Level 2: ??? arguably an atemporal set-theoretic approach
In practice in python list comprehensions are a superior syntax for computing with multiple source collections.
(!) Really all you need is reduce
You'd be silly to implement them that way of course but know your tools.