Thanks for the links, I must say I didn’t review a lot before but went off what I’ve seen people learning Elixir struggle with in real life.
I get your point about “if you read the docs, it shouldn’t be surprising and you shouldn’t expect it to work in any way”. That’s not how most people work though (imo), they’ve learned something in another programming language and it’s difficult to completely switch that part of esp. when learning. Particularly there are some things where I’d say elixir & erlang behaves extra weird.
Yup I know, but I do think bringing up that goes beyond the scope of the blog post
Never suggested that. I think how maps are matched is great and of course there should be no other way. It makes sense when you think about how their matching works, but still people sometimes expect %{} to match the empty map.
It’s not the only way, but it’s the default way that most Elixir functions use. The preference is also discussed in the discussion I linked Passing in options: Maps vs. Keyword lists - Chat / Discussions - Elixir Programming Language Forum The point isn’t about expecting them to work like maps, but that they are the default (in Elixir, Erlang switched over) and are less handy (imo) to handle this use case.
The problem here is that it “works” it just does something unexpected which isn’t exactly a great DevX. Also lots of Elixir programmers are coming from Ruby (like myself) and there this works - I don’t know about other languages but I’ve seen folks from different programming backgrounds be stung by this.
Why is that surprising? To me this isn’t surprising at all as that’s how . works - it raises if the key isn’t there and the key isn’t there.
I don’t expect a warning there - it’s just unexpected that our workaround for constants can actually change its value during the course of a module which isn’t really… constant. I know why it is and how it’s used, doesn’t make that property less confusing for new comers or potentially dangerous for a “constant” use case especially in huge modules (which you shouldn’t have, but many people do) easily producing odd bugs.