FWIW I literally never use Enum.at. Lists are the only thing I end up using on a regularly basis where “first” actually means something. That is, I’m not sure why I would ever call Enum.at(0) on a map. Given that looking at a list, List.first is just more semantically clear.

The difference is that, for an empty list, List.first/1 and Enum.at/2 will return nil and hd and pattern matching will raise an error.

There’s a big difference between hd and List.first however. [] |> hd blows up. [] |> List.first is nil. I almost never use hd because I can generally just pattern match when I expect there will be one thing. List.first is handy when I either want the first thing or nil if there isn’t any.