Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:60963
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain benramsey.com from 209.85.161.170 cause and error)
Sender: Ben Ramsey <ben@benramsey.com>
Message-ID: <4FE8BA77.9040901@php.net>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:22:31 -0500
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:13.0) Gecko/20120614 Thunderbird/13.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Matthew Weier O'Phinney <weierophinney@php.net>
CC: internals@lists.php.net
References: <4FE3759D.4010606@php.net> <4FE449BA.9040108@leo-peltier.fr> <4FE494A9.5040605@php.net> <4FE62A6A.9030901@sugarcrm.com> <3D.D4.56161.13978EF4@pb1.pair.com>
In-Reply-To: <3D.D4.56161.13978EF4@pb1.pair.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [DRAFT] RFC - array_column() function
From: ramsey@php.net (Ben Ramsey)

On 6/25/12 9:44 AM, Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote:
> On 2012-06-23, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@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