I’m old school so I haven’t worked much with Linq (Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) (C#) | Microsoft Docs) – beyond the absolute basics – until this year.
One of the methods I’ve needed to use quite a bit is the Enumerable.Select Method. Which has been hard to wrap my head around until I realised something:
The method name doesn’t fit my mental model.
And the reason is in the first line on the Microsoft documentation page:
Projects each element of a sequence into a new form.
The key word being “projects” (as in, a “projection”). Which in cody-cody speak means “take the data I’m giving it and turn it into something else”.
See, when I see “select” I think of SQL “SELECT”, and in most cases we’re just picking data columns you want to return. Though, to be far, now I think about it you can also “project” with it.
But still, when I think “select” in the context of data it’s “you’re going to give me some data, and I’m going to pick the bits I want”. Whereas with “project” – particular in the context of the code I’m working with – means we’re “transforming” the data and often pulling in other data peripherally linked to it (in a way acting as a join). This is often doing by calling another method that takes the current item in the data and does something with it – e.g. used some value from it to lookup or generate other data structures.
The Microsoft docs page Projection Operations (C#) | Microsoft Docs start with the following which explains it well:
Projection refers to the operation of transforming an object into a new form that often consists only of those properties that will be subsequently used. By using projection, you can construct a new type that is built from each object. You can project a property and perform a mathematical function on it. You can also project the original object without changing it.
So what I need to do in a lot of cases for the code I’m dealing with is mentally swap .Select( x => x. ... ) for .Project( x => x. ... ) and it makes much more sense.