For what my .02 is worth, I imagine "plucking" an item out of an array
would not occur to a user-land developer as the proper nomenclature for
extracting all the values from an array with the given key. At worst,
this means many developers simply won't learn about the function and
continue to implement it in user-land.
When array_column was offered as the name, I immediately knew what the
purpose was, before checking the RFC.
On 6/25/2012 12:22 PM, Ben Ramsey wrote:
On 6/25/12 9:44 AM, Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote:
On 2012-06-23, Stas Malyshev <smalys...@sugarcrm.com> wrote:
I'm open to changing or aliasing the name to array_pluck(), if others
are in agreement.
I wouldn't know what "pluck" means here. "Column" is a clear word with
established meaning. Let's not get too whimsical here.
Nothing whimsical about it at all, Stas. The definition is:
Take hold of (something) and quickly remove it from its place; pick
and synonyms include "pull" and "gather".
As Ralph noted, "column" is overloaded, as it has connotations dealing
with databases as well as tables, and arrays often represent neither.
I agree with Tom and Ralph that we should look at what others are
doing and pick a similar name. After searching on "pluck," though, I'm
getting mixed results on how pluck is used:
In Rails, it looks like pluck is used for the purpose that I've
created array_column, but it's used with ActiveRecord as a way to pull
a column of results from the database (much like
PDOStatement::fetchColumn). See here:
https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/a382d60f6abc94b6a965525872f858e48abc00de
However, in Prototype.js and Underscore.js, pluck seems behave more
like array_map() in PHP:
http://api.prototypejs.org/language/Enumerable/prototype/pluck/
http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/#pluck
Nevertheless, it would technically have the same effect as the
"column" functionality, since calling that method/property in
Javascript simply returns the value of the property or result of the
method call.
Also, the Python community has recently discussed adding pluck for lists:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/python-ideas/p9qtUzg9zsk
It looks like they already have some functionality that implements
similar behavior, though:
>>> stooges=[{'name': 'moe', 'age': 40}, {'name': 'larry', 'age': 50},
{'name': 'curly', 'age': 60}]
>>> names=[guy['name'] for guy in stooges]
>>> print names
['moe', 'larry', 'curly']
array_column/pluck in PHP would do the same:
$names = array_column($stooges, 'name');
If other languages/frameworks/libraries are using pluck to mean
exactly what this implementation means, then I agree with changing the
name to array_pluck, but if "pluck" also carries meaning similar to
array_map, then I don't want to confuse folks.
-Ben
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