https://github.com/whatyouhide/short_maps https://andrealeopardi.com/posts/a-story-of-regret-and-retir...
1. I do firmly believe this is a good language feature and a very natural extension of map literals syntax;
2. at the same time, being a language feature it should be simple - es6_maps works only with atom keys and has no extra features over the key expansion.
Point 1 is additionally reinforced by how easy it was to introduce to the compiler - I’m injecting just 9 lines of simple code, while parser and lexer already accept short-form maps without modifications.
[0] https://github.com/meyercm/shorter_map [1] https://elixirforum.com/t/es6-maps-ecmascript6-style-shortha...
I wonder what specifically the original author found made it more difficult to read. Was it unfamiliarity? They allude to some confusion between sigils and strings, so I wonder if the issue was partly an Elixir-specific one.
For example keyword lists as the last argument to a function don’t need brackets, and keyword lists are really lists of tuples where the first item is an atom. I feel like those two things are in some ways less obvious and more magical than this map shorthand.
You’re definitely correct that there’s as good an argument that these implicit features you mention are “too magical” as there is the the “ES6” syntax is too magical.