[BringTheTanks]

I'm talking about map(), and you're talking about filter().

Here's the code in question:

  .map(function(album){
    return {artist : album("vendor")("name")}
  })

If this is simply adding a node to an AST, it could be expressed without a function:

  .map({artist : ['album','vendor','name']})

Using a function for this would be quite superfluous.

[coffeemug]

You can express it both ways in RethinkDB, and they'd both do the same thing -- add a node to the AST. The function is just a convenience syntax.