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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

How do you feel about the Groovy/Kotlin style that would translate (roughly speaking):

[1,2,3].map{|n| n * 2}

to:

[1,2,3].map{it * 2}

It's not generalizable to multi-argument lambdas, but multi-argument lambdas are the ones that are more important to name. (e.g. with reduce, {|memo, it| memo += it})

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I don't feel strongly one way or the other to be honest. It looks nice but it's not a syntax that I have been wanting or needing. If it enables people to express themselves better through code, then I'm all for it.

I think as far as Ruby goes, I don't like the idea of introducing a new abstraction for something that already has a solution; however, I wouldn't villify someone for using it unless they wrote something that took a large number of arguments.

The underscore is fairly pleasant to read:

  [1,2,3].map{_*2}

I think that's what Scala has. For multi-args, perhaps:

  [1,2,3].reduce{_1+=_2}

Underscore is very commonly used to signifiy "I don't care about this argument" in Ruby, so at least on it's own it'd be confusing, and _1 is a valid local variable name, so would risk breaking existing code, though I've personally not seen it used, so maybe it'd be an acceptable risk.

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