Smalltalk faq: "Q28. What is the difference between chaining and cascading?"
Personally I like chaining because, since I read going right to left, in my head I can go "x goes to y then the result of y goes to z" versus "z is the result of y which is the result of x" (reading it backwards)
> This is always what I thought OOP should be, but could never put my finger on.
I'm not sure what Simula did, but at least in Smalltalk this is how OOP have worked :-)
> So, pretty much whether everything is being applied right to left vs being applied left to right?
I'm not sure that's the best takeaway; consider:
$ gst
GNU Smalltalk ready
st> 2 * 3; * 3; * 3
6
st> 2 * 3 * 3 * 3
54
In fact, in order to get chaining with keyword messages, you apparently need to define it, or especially adapt eg: containers to return ^self. But as should be obvious, I'm not very familiar with Smalltalk. Some more on the subject: http://blog.3plus4.org/2007/08/30/message-chains/
"moo".Replace('m', 'z').ToUpper();
Or, fully qualified with "every method in its own namespaced module";
"moo".(string.Replace('m', 'z')).(string.ToUpper());
I'm not sure if elixir is doing anything fancy here that I'm not seeing, though. I still haven't had a chance to try it out.
More or less it rewrites
String.downcase("FOO\0BAR") |> String.split("\0")
String.split(String.downcase("FOO\0BAR"), "\0")
And when you do use classes (Structs), there's line-local context-free crystal-clarity between code that expects a generic object expressing one of the class's interfaces (where calls are made on the interface's Protocol module) vs. code that expects that particular class (where calls are made on the class's module, which contains the implementations of the Protocol functions.)