From: Gavin Kistner <gavin@...>
Date: 2004-09-30T22:28:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Too Many Ways?

On Sep 30, 2004, at 7:12 AM, Chris Pine wrote:
> (Yes, if you are teaching Ruby to a functional programmer, you use map 
> instead of collect (are those really the same? I just always avoided 
> collect:  wrong english word, I think), but you still teach them only 
> *one* of them.)

Funny, I never understood what #map did. People used it all the time 
and it baffled me. I kept saying "I should learn this method, because 
people keep showing how to use it for powerful, terse solutions, 
but...I'm baffled."

Then someone showed me the #collect method, and I fell in love. It's 
awesome. I extended arrays in Javascript to use it, I love it so much.

...it was a week later than I pulled up the documentation and saw that 
they're the same thing. Something about 'map' made absolutely no sense 
to me (it implies a hash-like permanent connection between the old and 
the new), and collect made perfect sense (go traipsing through the 
entire field of daisies, picking up only the best ones).

So if we were deprecating duplicates, I vote to get rid of #map.
(This is the part where 100 rubyists say "No! #collect sucks, #map is 
king!" and my entire argument for less duplication is shot down by the 
fact that people like different things.)
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