"You draw the line farther toward "reshape things to expose their _____ish quality" and embrace 'coerce as a way to abstract the _____ away. As for me, I suppose I've come to believe _____ is an intrinsically subjective, second-class concept."
That's a pretty good summary. I really haven't considered that alternative at all, so keep me posted on how it goes :)
Lol, by "second-class concept", I mean something that isn't modeled as a value in the language. My gut reaction is that it takes zero work to pursue that alternative. :-p
But yeah, I do still need to solve the same problems 'coerce solves. My alternative, if it isn't obvious by now, is to have global functions that do (fooify x) and occasionally (transform-as-foo x (fn (fooish-x) fooish-result)).
coerce, ify, transform, these seem really similar to me. Why bother splitting such hairs?
I'm reminded of your earlier statement: The purpose of a coercion isn't entirely explained by "I want something of type X." In these cases, it's "I want a Y of type X," and the Y is what's different. Perhaps you didn't go far enough? If you're going to eschew coerce why not get rid of all trace of the types? Don't call it stringify. Call it serialize. Don't call it transform-to-int, call it parse-number. Don't call it aslist, call it scan. Or something like that. It isn't these names, but good name choices would bring me entirely in your camp :)
Ah, right. ^_^ Yeah, most of the times I "use" these things, I'm just making some other abstract nonsense utility. It could be a while until I have another down-to-earth application to try this stuff on.
coerce, ify, transform, these seem really similar to me.
Well, I don't distinguish "ify" from "coerce" except when it helps tell apart the subtle variants we're talking about in this conversation. :-p The subtle variants wouldn't all go into the same language, I hope.
"Transform," on the other hand, seems more general. Really, 'transform as a type wouldn't mean anything other than "unary function, preferably pure." I could very well be splitting hairs by drawing a distinction between that context and the everyday "function" context. However, I think there are some things I want to treat differently between those cases, like ints (multiplication in function position, constant functions in transform position).
If you're going to eschew coerce why not get rid of all trace of the types?
Actually, that's how I think about it. Coercion is a technique to focus output ranges or widen input ranges so utilities are easier to use. If I consistently want a certain kind of focusing--and only then--I'll put it into a utility.
I name those utilities to correspond not with specific types but with informal target sets, usually based on the extensible utilities they support. However, any given tagged type means little except the extensions associated with it, so I think my approach has a natural tendency toward corresponding names anyway.
Don't call it [this], call it [that].
I think I agree with you there. However, I don't expect to come up with witty names as fast as I change my mind about the designs of things. :) For now I'm happy resorting to cookie-cutter names like 'fooify, 'fooish, and 't-foo, just so it's easier to notice relationships between variables and between informal concepts.
"Coercion is a technique to focus output ranges or widen input ranges.."
That's a nice way to think about it.
"I don't expect to come up with witty names as fast as I change my mind about the designs of things. :) For now I'm happy resorting to cookie-cutter names like 'fooify, 'fooish, and 't-foo"
