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Comment by vortico | Hacker News Reader

I think the article does a pretty good job at convincing the most perfectionist of web developers that "Well... okay, sure, we'll call it flat instead of flatten."

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I'd consider 'flatten' a common, somewhat agreed upon term for that specific operation. Which is why I find this annoying, not a huge deal, but certainly annoying. The perfectionist in me though is most annoyed that calling flatten 'flat' feels like calling reduce 'reduction', it's just not consistent with the other methods.

But after reading the article, you should agree with the decision, right? It was completely justified, and all options were explored.

Personally I somewhat lean towards the side of breaking the library in question, which could be ok if enough warning is given. They mentioned being worried that not everyone would fix their unmaintained sites but I don't think unmaintained sites make a lot of long term promises anyway. Space Jams aside of course.

So while I don't necessarily agree with the decision I completely understand it, their motivation is very noble. And again, it's not that big of a deal as a one off decision.

IMO "flat" is a better name, because "flatten" suggests a modifying operation is being performed on the array. "flattened" might be another option.

Well looking at the form the other operations (map, reduce, filter, etc..) are they usually describe what is being done to the source as a way to describe the output. As opposed to just describing the outcome. That being said there are some weird ones like "some" or "every". Regardless though some other well known FP languages use flatten so it lowers the barrier to entry on the API for people familiar with them.

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