Because there is no monopoly or unified way in how we teach people the language, nor in how people learn. We can’t assume Enum will be taught and, even if it is, different people will take different amount of times to grasp it. Is it really worth saying: you will be unable to solve certain problems unless you fully grasp this concept, while elsewhere it is considerably easier to tackle it?
Look, I completely understand those who don’t like the solution, consider it may bloat the language, or don’t like the proposed syntax. But I was honestly hoping more empathy towards the problem statement. Telling people “oh, you can use map_reduce” to me is somewhat equivalent to the famous joke:
A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?
It is not even about learning. There is one assumption and one personal preference here:
- I assume that something like local accumulators will provide several users a better on-boarding ramp
- I personally prefer the Python (and other imperative language) solutions to this problem
And this is not about Python. Pick any imperative language and their solution will be clearer. Python just happens to be the most concise one. As I said in the other thread, give any Elixir developer both the Python and the Elixir solution, and I believe the majority will most likely understand what is happening on the Python one in less time, because of the amount of boilerplate in the Elixir one.
There is a meme that is applicable here. Some of you may have seen a slide about design patterns in OO and FP languages:
Yet we have this here:
| FP |
Imperative |
map |
loop |
reduce |
loop |
flat_map |
loop |
flat_map_reduce |
loop |
scan |
loop |
count_by |
Oh my, loop |
count_until |
loop+break |
take_while |
loop+break |
split_while |
loop+break |
drop_while |
loop+break |
reduce_while |
loop+break |
| … |
… |
And it goes on and on.
Look, I love the Enum module. It provides a great shared vocabulary. But we need to acknowledge it is a sizeable step in our learning curve. Once again, I don’t think it means we need to accept this, but I do think the status quo can be improved considerably.
).
haha.
