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The best known programming language in the 1980s, BASIC, had a FOR that was limited to counting. A lot of people without formal CS education would think Python’s for can go over a finite set of things and live happily at that level of abstraction without ever needing to peek under the bonnet and learn how iterators work (in Python).

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Sure. But you know, from personal experience, you can be a happy BASIC user writing simple games without knowing about the existence of arrays. It's a bit hard, but nothing copy & paste couldn't defeat. And while learning about `DIM` was quite a breakthrough for my 8 y.o. self, I'm not sure I'd welcome an article about it on HN's front page.

The same is true for iterator protocols: as noted in my other comment, they have existed since 1975 in almost the same form (with a few closely related variants). It's not easy to find a mainstream language that doesn't support them "since forever" (in "tech years"). They're just not news, no matter how you slice it.

Still, the average programmer lives happily without ever looking what’s under the syntax of their language. While I agree the mode here on HN is not the average programmer, there are always newcomers and larvae who need our support to develop fully into adult developers.

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