Comment by kazinator

It seems like a waste of precious syntax to dedicate backticks to running shell commands.

What's between the backticks is not even portable; the commands rely on an operating-system-specific command interpreter.

> puts `ls`.lines.map { |name| name.strip.length } # prints the lengths of the filenames

Fantastic example, except for the commandment violation: "thou shalt not parse the output of 'ls'"!

You really want to read the directory and map over the stat function (or equivalent) to get the length.

  2> (flow "."
       open-directory
       get-lines
       (mapcar [chain stat .size]))
  (727 2466 21 4096 643 16612 5724 163 707 319 352135 140 51 0 4096
   114898 1172428 1328258 4096 4096 4096 29953 4096 4096 0 27 4096
   4096 35585 8450 968 40960 14610 4096 14 755128 1325258 4096 17283
   218 471 104 4096 99707 1255 4096 129 4096 721 9625 401 15658
   4096 235 98 1861 664 23944 4286 4096 1024 0)