On 1 November 2015 at 08:14, Pascal Schumacher <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everybody, > > what about adding the more common names of map/reduce/filter for the Ruby > inspired collect/inject/grep methods?
This has been debated before, though I don't remember the conclusion, if there was any. The analog of `filter` would probably be `findAll`. `grep` is something else. There are other, similar or similarly named methods in Groovy - collectMany, collectNested, collectEntries, findResults come to mind. Should they be aliased as well and what would their aliases be? `collectMany` can clearly be `flatMap`, but others may not be so obvious. > > Imho these names are more descriptive and would make it easier for > beginners. Not necessarily more descriptive, but certainly more common. Apart from Smalltalk, Ruby and Groovy, I don't know of another language that uses e.g. `inject` (though it may be that my knowledge is just not wide enough). > > What do you think? I currently know of exactly one case of synonyms in the Groovy stdlib: `with` <-> `identity`. In Ruby this could be called standard practice. I remember back in 2004 (or about), when I was learning Ruby, that this practice had not been entirely helpful, while juggling with different concepts that Ruby introduced upon unsuspecting newb. There is one more point - while reading someone else's code one has to be familiar with both variants. So, beginners might find it easier to find what they're looking for, but it might introduce a slight confusion as well. In the end, one would need to learn the names as well as the aliases. Cheers, Dinko > > -Pascal
