Collectors update, bikeshed edition

[David Holmes]

I'm coming at this from a position of complete ignorance. I've never 
learnt functional programming though I had been exposed to some 
functional style of operations. The names collect/inject/fold are all 
equally meaningless to me. While I think I know what groupBy does I 
don't recognize it as a concrete instance of some abstract concept 
(folding, injection, aggregating etc).

So my question is, for people who will learn Java through the 
primary/traditional channels (is schools, college, university etc), 
where would they learn the underlying concepts that these API's pertain 
to? And what terminology are they most likely to encounter there?

FWIW I would much rather have a name with no obvious meaning than a name 
that I'm likely to think means something quite different to what it is. 
(unfortunately that is likely to apply to any verb we might use here.)

David

On 8/02/2013 11:38 AM, Brian Goetz wrote:
> Don has been filling my mailbox daily brainstorming alternate names for
> "collect".  If we were to rename collect, the ones that seems most
> tolerable (largely on the basis of prior art) are "inject" and "fold".
> Inject is the name used by Smalltalk, Ruby, and Groovy for this.  Again,
> not that I'm claiming that this is any sort of proof of superiority, but
> some people will be familiar with the name, and that's worth something.
>
> When I first came across "inject" I didn't like it.  Its primary value
> seemed to that it rhymed with {sel,rej,det,inf,negl}ect.  But, like
> "fold" (in the baking sense), there's a physical analogy of injecting
> ingredients one at a time into a larger entity or aggregation that
> absorbs them.  It rubs most people the wrong way at first, but you do
> get used to it, and eventually it makes sense.
>
> Anyway, not to get Don's hopes up, but inject does have one big benefit
> over collect, and that is the challenges faced by Collector.  One of the
> bad things about the name Collector is that it *doesn't* actually
> collect things!  Instead, it is a template/recipe/scheme for *how* to
> collect things.  But we can't use the word Collection because that
> clearly means something else, and
> CollectorTemplate/CollectorStrategy/CollectorScheme all seem too
> roundabout.
>
> But Injector works better as a name for what we now call Collector; you
> can convince yourself that a groupBy() injects data into a Map.  Or, if
> you don't like that, the space of InjectionXxx is open (unlike with
> collect), such as InjectionScheme.
>
> I could tolerate switching to inject and some flavor of
> Injector/InjectionScheme.  I could also tolerate fold(), but that is
> more likely to engender "that's not a fold", and Folder has the same
> problem as Collection.
>
> .NET calls this Aggregate, by the way.  And Aggregator is clear too.
> Though Doug wants us to keep Aggregate free for some future Collection
> type, and given how rabid I've been about things like syntactic
> real-estate management, I think I must reluctantly agree.
>
>
> On 1/30/2013 3:42 PM, Raab, Donald wrote:
>> In my opinion, collect should return a collection.  It should not
>> reduce to any result.  In the interest of time, here's a stab at an
>> alternative list I came up with using the powers of thesaurus yesterday:
>>
>> into
>> gather
>> assemble
>> summarize
>>
>> The functionality currently called collect feels more like
>> injectInto/inject in Smalltalk/Ruby/Groovy, but nothing is being
>> injected into the method collect directly, but by the Collector (the R
>> in makeResult()).  InjectInto/inject is the equivalent of foldLeft.  I
>> would be less concerned over using injectInto or inject than collect,
>> as at least it seems similar enough in that it can return any value,
>> determined by the injector (currently called Collector).  But folks
>> here might consider injectInto and foldLeft too cryptic, so I decided
>> to just shorten to into in the above list.
>>
>> http://groovy.codehaus.org/groovy-jdk/java/util/Collection.html#inject(groovy.lang.Closure)
>>
>>
>> In the binary release I have (not sure if this is different in current
>> source), two of the overloaded versions of the method collect create a
>> FoldOp today (a hint), and the Collector interface has a method called
>> accumulate and combine and is called MutableReducer in the javadoc.
>> The methods named reduce also create FoldOp instances.  This makes
>> reduce and collect seem eerily similar.
>>
>> I find this a little confusing, but I have tried my best anyway to
>> name that which by any other name seems to be more like
>> injectInto/mapReduce/foldL/aggregate/etc. to me.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>>>>    I will do
>>>> my best and find an alternative that everyone else here likes.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>> -Doug
>>