Tony Morris

I actually kind of disagree. map(f).getOrElse(y) clearly conveys the intent of your code and makes it easy to understand for other people. fold(y)(f) doesn't. In my case at least, I always have to do the mental gymnastic of "oh, this means map.getOrElse"

Honest question though: is that a proper fold? In my mind, fold is heavily linked to monoids: - takes an "empty" value - takes a merge function that's basically a monoidal append This is not what Option.fold does. Am I misunderstanding what fold is?

Your mixing `Foldable` (the typeclass) with the algebraic fold, the later is basically isomorphic to pattern matching. The fact that folding on a List is recursive, is incidental (because the type itself is recursive), not the opposite.

Ah. So then, on the one hand it makes sense, on the other, I feel it might be a fact in favour of my argument: it might be unreasonable (today) to expect most developers to know about algebraic folds, and map(x).getOrElse(y) *will* be more readable for the majority of them