[jzimbel]

This was done previously with the `short_maps` library, which the author—a member of the Elixir core team—eventually retired and archived due to regrets from the undesirable impacts on clarity.

https://github.com/whatyouhide/short_maps https://andrealeopardi.com/posts/a-story-of-regret-and-retir...

[kzemek]

There was also a relatively popular fork shorter_maps [0], mentioned in the blog post above. My motivation for implementing es6_maps instead of using/updating shorter_maps was (I'm copying from my post in the Elixir forums [1]):

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...

[MrJohz]

That's quite surprising to me. As someone who writes a lot of Javascript, I usually find it easiest to read with this syntax than without it, and I generally recommend to my team that they use the shorthand where they can. This is because the meaning is clear and well-known, and being concise (while still being clear) is very valuable.

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.

[igsomething]

The map '%{username, age, first_name, last_name}' would be 1 character away from the tuple '{username, age, first_name, last_name}'. It is easy to miss the '%' character and you'll waste some time figuring out why your code is throwing match and/or function clause errors at runtime.

[Dkuku]

Using this logic [username, age first_name, last_name] is only 2 characters away. This example is easy to catch because tuple and map work completly different-it's not python.

[aarongraham]

I really don’t understand why some people are so against this as a language feature. I get that the community tries to stay away from “magic” but where is the line between magic and convenient syntactic sugar.

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.

[hhreefgguu]

Magic == “I don’t like it, but I want to sound more objective or rational than I really am”.

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.