The problem is the "you" in question is not always able to. When "you" write code it makes sense and so you don't need to assign many names. The you in six months will want more names, and in 6 years that will be different again (how many depends - if this code is changed often then you know it much better than if it has been stable). The worse case will be after you "get hit by a bus" and the "you" in question is some poor person who has never seen this code before.
Unlike the procedural approach, every step in a functional chain is wholly isolated and independent from the others. It is strictly easier to split this style of code up into two halves and name them than it is to disentangle procedural equivalents.
I have quite literally zero times in my ~25 year career had to deal with some sort of completely inscrutable chain of functional calls on iterators. Zero. I am entirely convinced that the people arguing against this style have never actually worked in a project where people used this style. It's okay! The first time I saw these things I, too, was terribly confused and skeptical.
I will admit to not having written any significant functional code. However the poster child for functional programming always seems to be small programs (xmonad is the largest one I can think of, and the procedural counterparts are not that big either. Of course there is a lot of code out there that nobody can talk about). Thus I have to conclude the question of how that style scales to really large programs remains open.
That said, you didn't address my comment at all. It might be easier, but that doesn't mean it is easy to figure out what that long chain is really done - all too often the algorithm names don't tell you what you are really trying to accomplish in my experience.
Ahh, it gets really interesting when you read code that does have named variables… and they’re misleading.
A strength of functional idioms is that they expose the structure of the code in a way that a name - even a well chosen name - can only hope to achieve. Often, succinctly and comprehensively. At that point you stop caring so much about variable names. They’re still there but you need them less
