@hissssst, my whole reply was about the problem statement. I understand the cons of the current solution, but the cons of the current solution isn’t a dismissal of the problem statement itself. Those are two separate things.
Your argument is based on corner cases of how the same variable is reassigned within the same list. I honestly can’t recall seeing these examples in either Elixir or Python/Ruby/JS code. I can be convinced that it can be confusing, but that argument ain’t it.
Sure, but is this really a problem?
Elixir doesn’t strictly need the Task module. You can do everything it does with either GenServer and regular process abstractions. But it is an extremely useful component for both Elixir on boarding experience and in actual applications.
Imagine if every time we wanted to do async/await, we told people to write this:
list
|> Enum.map(fn item ->
ref = make_ref()
parent = self()
spawn_link(fn -> send(parent, {ref, ...}) end)
ref
end)
|> Enum.map(fn ref ->
receive do
{^ref, reply} -> reply
end
end)
Which is akin to how Erlang developers would express it.
We often try to make common patterns in Elixir more accessible. And the duality you mention exists pretty much in Ruby, Python, JS, Java, Rust, etc. Once again, I don’t think we should do it because those languages do it, but the costs of having two approaches to these problems are minimal (and common).
To be clear: I am not speaking about this particular solution, just the problem statement in itself and the assumption that “Enum is fine”.
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