Here's a revised version with corrected grammar and clarity:
Kernel.hd/1 and Kernel.tl/1 raise an ArgumentError when given an empty list
([]). In my humble opinion, it would be beneficial to have safe versions of
these functions, ideally following Elixir's naming convention: hd! and tl!
for the raising variants, and hd and tl for the safe ones returning {:ok,
term} or {:error, :empty_list}. I understand that this may not be a problem
for writing expressive code, as we can always pattern match on lists
instead of using these two functions. However, I believe it could be a
potential issue for newcomers. Of course, the elephant in the room here is
backward compatibility, but perhaps that could be considered for a major
release?
For what it's worth, the same issue exists in the Haskell ecosystem, where
the head and tail functions defined in the Prelude also raise errors on
empty lists. This has been a persistent annoyance for the community, and
many alternative Preludes ship with functions returning Maybe a values to
address this. While the official Prelude in Haskell has never changed for
backward compatibility reasons, in Haskell, you have the option to not
import it, but that's not an option in Elixir.
Any ideas? I'm happy to hear everyone's thoughts on this. Thanks in advance
for your feedback.
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