I don’t think it’s bad to use Map.merge/2, but the way you use it as a fallback seems weird (and you wouldn’t have a base case if your map didn’t have an "a" key, for example).

Here’s how I would write your module:

defmodule Foobar do
  @default_params %{"e" => 10}
  def foo(params) do
    params = Map.merge(@default_params, params)
    do_something(params["a"], params["b"], params["c"], params["d"], params["e"])
  end

  def do_something(a, b, c, d, e) do
    IO.inspect("#{a}-#{b}-#{c}-#{d}-#{e}")
  end
end

But that may just be because of how I handle options to functions. I write a lot of single-public-function modules where I’m passing around the options to a lot of private functions and want the defaulting to happen in one place. They’ll look something like this:

defmodule My.Service do
  @default_opts %{charlie: true, delta: []}

  def call(alpha, bravo, opts \\ []) do
    opts = Enum.into(opts, @default_opts)

    with :ok <- validate_something(alpha, opts),
         {:ok, echo} <- do_something(alpha, bravo, opts) do
      {:ok, bravo + echo}
    end
  end

  ...
end

I agree with @Marcus. I’d like to keep on using a map instead of having to define a struct for this function only. But if this case would be occurring in more than one function, the struct would actually be the way to go I think, so thanks

@sigu
This case should not be the cause of using a struct. I mean the decision for a struct should be related to the problem and not to using some special syntax.
@PJUllrich
The idiomatic way for me is not to use pattern matching just for the case of extracting values from a map. The pattern matching in the parameters should have always a good reason.

For me foocould be written as:

def foo(data) do
  do_something(
    Map.get(data, "a"),
    Map.get(data, "b"),
    Map.get(data, "c"),
    Map.get(data, "d"),
    Map.get(data, "e", 10)
  )
end

or

def foo(data) do
  defaults = %{"e" => 10}
  %{"a" => a, "b" => b, "c" => c, "d" => d, "e" => e} = Map.merge(defaults, data)
  do_something(a, b, c, d, e)
end