We had this discussion at length in several places (clojure mailing list,
clojure-dev mailing list, reddit probably) over a year ago when any? was
added in 1.9.0-alpha10. Search the archives for the prior discussions, I
don't have time right now to re-summarize it all.
On Sunday, October 8, 2017 at 11:56:11 AM UTC-5, Timothy Dean wrote:
>
> If the ship has sailed, why, then, the ship has sailed. I only send this
> now because I'd already written it before I saw your reply, Alex.
>
> I do not think `any?` is a "gigantic" mistake, though I do think it is
> confusing. I expect to see a few some?/any? bugs from beginners. `some?`
> and `any? essentially represent two English synonyms, both defined in the
> same namespace, each of which represents a check for existence, under two
> competing ontological frameworks.
>
> The bandit stopped me, asking, "Do you have Anything?"
> "I do," I said, "please don't hurt me."
> "If you have Something, hand it over!"
> I handed him nothing.
> "You said you had Something!"
> "No, you asked me if I had Anything!"
> "Just hand it over!"
> As he was irate and carried a big stick, I gave up and handed him Nothing.
>
> Ultimately the source of confusions such as this arise from the fact that
> Clojure is a language with a concrete token (Something) representing
> Nothing. some/any just compounds the confusion. But this problem arises in
> certain philosophies of ontology, and there already exists a distinction
> that strikes me as being quite natural in common English and a good fit for
> Clojure and spec: the distinction between something/nothing and
> presence/absence.
>
> I would propose `present?` as the name to replace `any?`.
>
> ----
>
> But if the ship has sailed, then onward ho! Clojure will still be a great
> tool.
>
> ~Timothy Dean
>
> On Friday, October 6, 2017 at 5:55:31 PM UTC-6, Alex Miller wrote:
>>
>> This ship has sailed.
>>
>> On Oct 6, 2017, at 6:04 PM, Alan Thompson <cloo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Before 1.9.0 is officially released, I would like to propose a revisit to
>> the semantic mismatch introduced by the *clojure.core/any? *function.
>>
>> Many, many people are dissatisfied by the choice of *clojure.core/any?*
>> to be defined as *(constantly true)*, which is completely in conflict
>> with *clojure.core/not-any?* . After all, any logical person would
>> automatically assume that:
>>
>> (= (not-any? args...) (not (any? args...))
>>
>>
>> for any set of legal arguments. This follows the well-established
>> tradition in Clojure of having negated pairs such as* if* vs *if-not*,
>> *when *vs *when-not*, *every? *vs* not-every?*, etc.
>>
>> However, I can see that it is convenient to say something like this:
>>
>> (s/fdef clojure.core/declare
>> :args (s/cat :names (s/* simple-symbol?))
>> :ret any?)
>>
>>
>> It seems a simple solution to the problem would be to just define some
>> keyword specs in place of the globally visible *any? *function. The
>> following example shows that we could define *:clojure.spec/pass-all *and
>> *:clojure.spec/pass-none* which would could serve as an exact
>> replacement for *any? *(& its negative).
>>
>> (:require [clojure.spec.alpha :as s] ...)
>> (deftest demo
>> (s/def ::s/pass-all (constantly true))
>> (s/def ::s/pass-none (constantly false))
>>
>> (is (s/valid? ::s/pass-all 5 ))
>> (is (s/valid? ::s/pass-all "joe" ))
>> (is (s/valid? ::s/pass-all { :blah 42 :blue 66 :hut! 'hut! }))
>> (is (not (s/valid? ::s/pass-none 5 ))))
>>
>>
>> Since 1.9.0 is not out yet, is not too late to avoid a permanent
>> pollution of the language with a gigantic mistake such as *any?*. At
>> the very least, the function could be moved to *clojure.spec/any?* from
>> *clojure.core*. If we insist on adding this blatant contradiction to
>> *clojure.core*, we won't even have the excuse of a committee to blame it
>> on.
>>
>> Alan Thompson
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 4:15 PM, Nathan Smutz <nsm...@gmail.com
>> <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=nsm...@gmail.com>>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Is there a Tricky Names for Nubies page?
>>> We might save some stack-overflow searches.
>>>
>>> In the spirit of Honest Trailers: if we named functions for what they do:
>>> or -> first-truthy
>>> some -> first-satisfying
>>> some? -> not-nil?
>>> any? -> return-true
>>>
>>> Are there others?
>>>
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