They were attempting to use a meme acronym sarcastically -- an example of content-free commenting that works well for karma elsewhere but hopefully doesn't gain a foothold here.

On topic, I agree with your amplification of your point.

(They tend to be downvoted to oblivion, 'round these parts.)

I guess while syntactic sugar is usually considered a functionality of the language itself, it surely is used in the way I meant it, too... random search result:

http://www.developerdrive.com/2012/05/an-introduction-to-und...

"In this part of the tutorial we’re going to take a look at some of the syntactic sugar that Underscore gives us to work with array-like collection."

And of course, even if I had been utterly wrong for using the term, my point would stand unmoved, but you know that :)

Underscore as a production library is 4kb. The functions are terse, and its extremely easy to understand what they're doing - nothing is generally hidden (this example is pretty easy to understand, yet one of the most "complex" uses of underscore I've seen).

At the end of the day on a production javascript app of multiple thousand lines of JS, it likely actually saves me bytes over the wire from not having to write "for(var x = 0...." every time I want to iterate through something or filter an array or find if an array includes something etc (There's around 70 bytes removed in this single example).

But if you do it a lot in your code, that just means you can easily copy and paste it from a nearby place? At least that's what I often end up doing.